Tormented (12 page)

“We’re not ready,” I said, feeling that queasy, icy sensation in my gut. “And he can outrun us both.” I was already reaching for my cell phone and dialing a number I knew by heart. “He’s already gone.”

“You just going to let him go?” Augustus asked, fingers tense on my shoulder. I got the feeling he still wanted to push past me and go into hot pursuit.

I didn’t answer him; I just waited for the voice at the other end of the line as my cell phone trilled in my ear. When Andrew Phillips picked up, I didn’t even wait for him to get out more than a syllable before I spoke. “Anselmo Serafini is back in town. We need to add a manhunt for him because, unless I miss my guess … he’s here to cause some havoc.”

There was cool liquid seeping through my shirt as I awoke, a rude awakening if ever there was one. Faces swam into view above me and I took a sputtering breath, my head hard against the floor. It wasn’t the first time I’d woken up on the floor, not by any means, but it was the first time I’d done so on the floor of a bar a long damned way from home.

Jake and Brant were on either side of me, faces heavy with concern. Just above me, upside down but much more neutral about the whole thing, was Sarah, who looked just about the same when she realized I was awake as she had a few minutes earlier sitting at the bar.

“Can you hear me?” Sarah asked, calm and collected, like this was a thing that happened all the time. For all I knew, it did.

“Hear you, see you, smell the martini on your breath,” I said, lurching up to sitting position while the three of them gave way for me to do so. “You know what I’d like to hear, though?”

“Postmodern Jukebox do some Sinatra?” Brant asked innocently. “I feel like they’d knock it out of the park, really. Just a fantasy I have.”

“That wouldn’t be very postmodern,” I said, focusing on the bar beyond the three of them. “And no. I mean, yes, it would be amazing, but not right now. I want to hear someone start spilling their guts about what’s happening to me here.”

Sarah regarded me as coolly as ever, while Brant and Jake exchanged a look. Brant ended up speaking first. “What do you think is happening here?”

“I think someone is messing with my mind,” I said, getting to my feet. Cool drops of my drink slid their way down my belly under my shirt. “A telepath.”

“Uhh … can’t say I have much experience with telepaths,” Jake said, probably trying to sound reassuring. “Are you certain you’re not just … overworked or something? We tend to get a lot of folks that have trouble unwinding when they first get here.”

That brought a stock-still quiet, and I looked past them to see that the place had cleared out, that we were the only ones left in Shorty’s. “Where’s the lawman?”

“You talking about Z?” Brant asked, looking toward the door. “He left a while ago.”

“Z?” I asked, looking around the bar. “Please tell me his middle name is also Z, and his last name is Top.”

“Hah,” Brant said, pointing a finger at me. “Good one. No, his name is Zebulon Darwin, so people call him Z.” He looked toward the door nervously. “Uhh, you want me to call him back over? He’s probably off for the rest of the night.”

“Does that mean if I dial 911, he’ll show up sometime tomorrow morning?” I asked, brushing past Jake to head for the door. I went down the ramp and burst out of Shorty’s into a torrential downpour. Rain fell from the sky in a steady flow, and my hair was soaked two seconds after I got out there. The little overhang of Shorty’s roof did nothing to stop the hard-blown rain from blasting me like it had been turned loose from an elephant shower.

“Aww, you didn’t need to go out in this,” Brant said from a few steps behind me as I stood on the edge of the sidewalk, staring up and down the street.

“Sienna, it’s got to be forty degrees out here,” Sarah called from just inside the door. I looked back to see her silhouetted in the entry to the bar and did a double take because she looked oddly familiar. My eyes pierced the veil of light that cast her in shadow, and I realized it was just Sarah, truly her, yelling to overcome the sound of the rain hammering the sidewalk and rooftops around us with deafening sound.

“Hey,” Jake said, and he laid a reassuring hand on my elbow. He’d ventured farther out than the other two, with Sarah still lurking in the entryway and Brant only a couple steps out of the bar, blanching at the dousing he was receiving. I felt the rain patter on my head, soak my shirt, my pants, my skin, and I didn’t care. “Come back inside,” he said.

“I don’t like this,” I said, staring back down the darkened street. I couldn’t even see the clouds above, and an artificial night had set in, because I knew for a fact that if it hadn’t been raining, the high-summer sun would still have been shedding its light in the sky.

“It’s some pretty crap weather,” Jake agreed, not realizing that wasn’t what I was talking about. “All the more reason to go back into the bar.”

The visibility was so poor I couldn’t even see the dock at the end of the street. A curtain of rain cut off my view of the world about thirty feet away. “Not that,” I said. “I’m talking about this thing that’s being done to me.”

“I don’t really know anything about what you’re going through,” Jake said, stepping to where I could see him, standing there in the freezing cold downpour, looking desperately uncomfortable, “but I don’t think you’re going to solve it by standing out in this mess, catching your death.”

I snorted. “Only mothers say ‘catch your death.’”

Jake smiled. “You’ve met my wife. Which of us do you think is the most maternal?” My stony resolve broke under the light laugh I let go at that, and I shivered at the chill. “Come back inside,” Jake said. “We’ll talk about it if you want.”

I cast my eyes once more around the town, wondering where Z had gone. I could feel the sense of paranoia start to settle in, that desire to run through town and grab hold of everyone, shaking each of them while questioning them about what was happening, as though the physical act of rustling them like a dirty carpet would loose the dirt they were hiding. I questioned whether I was crazy to even still be here, talking to Brant, Jake and Sarah. They could have been involved in this psychological warfare exercise, after all. They could have been the key players for all I knew.

I pulled lightly against Jake’s hand on my elbow. He wasn’t maintaining much of a hold, so I slipped free without even trying. He didn’t attempt to grasp me again, just stood there. “Come inside,” he asked once again, gently. My suspicious nature warred with my desire to talk to someone, anyone, to not be … alone, in a cabin, by myself, while this … whatever this was … was going on.

“All right,” I said and followed him back toward the bar. It wasn’t as though I was in any real peril. Not yet, anyway.

Besides, at least now I knew what I was dealing with. A telepath. And when I got my full strength back with my other souls tomorrow, I was going to track them down and crack their skull open like an egg for messing with me. Then maybe I’d get back to this business of vacation, all fun and fancy free. Or something like that. Because it was still me, after all.

When Andrew Phillips came driving up in his company car, I’ll admit I had to stifle a little bit of a grin. As I've said before, I like the guy, but about nine months earlier Sienna had destroyed the agency director’s car while fending off a terrorist attack, and the replacement was, uh, tied up in budgetary issues. Phillips had made his fair share of enemies in his short tenure at the agency, and while I didn’t count myself as one of them, Ariadne Fraser, our head of finance, clearly did.

So, for now, Andrew Phillips, on the rare occasions he needed to leave the agency campus for work reasons, had been assigned a Volkswagen Beetle. Not a normal government car by any means, but the motor pool had assured him that it was well-treated and normally used for surveillance work when we needed something nondescript. It was low mileage, probably the lowest mileage vehicle we had in the motor pool, and since we’d had the aforementioned budgetary issues and no one else had surrendered their car, Phillips was kind of stuck. He could have demanded someone give up their SUV or he could have pitched a fit and looked like an ass. He’d chosen the more politically astute move of simply going with the flow and had not complained about it, as I suspect more than one person in his position might have done.

Oh, and this particular car? It was orange. I didn’t even know they made them in this shade of orange/brown, which I would characterize as a burnt sienna (no pun intended). Apparently when the agency bought it, we were aiming for the ‘hide in plain sight’ style of surveillance.

Phillips came squealing to a stop in the middle of the crime scene, lights mounted in his front window flashing. Credit where it was due, he’d driven himself (because a budget for a chauffeur also got, uh … lost) and when he levered his tall frame out of the small car, he stretched. I was sure the drive hadn’t been all that pleasant, especially since rush hour was still going on. The Beetle looked way out of place in the middle of all the cop cars and ambulances and fire trucks.

“What’s going on, Harry Dresden?” I quipped as Phillips stalked over to me. He had a pretty neutral expression most of the time, calm just this side of thunderclouds drifting over his brow.

Phillips came at me full steam, stopping just short of running into me. I guess he was in a hurry. “What the hell is going on here?” he asked, voice clear but not very pleasant.

“Anselmo Serafini is back in town,” I said, though I knew he already had this tidbit of information. “He attacked us while we were eating dinner.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Phillips said, leaning forward. “What the hell is happening here?”

“It’s a crime scene,” I said, after taking everything in. “There were witnesses, some minor injuries—”

“And you started a manhunt for him,” Phillips said, and at this I caught a flash of anger in his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I guess I could have waited for you to give the approval—”

“Do you realize how incompetent this makes us look?” Phillips asked, folding his arms in front of him. The storm clouds were gathering over his head now. “This is the one who got away, and in addition to the incident at the airport earlier, it makes us look like we’re complete boobs.”

“Serafini is a serious threat,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “I couldn’t just ignore the fact that we had a very obvious sighting of him here in our backyard—”

“Have you ever heard of anyone on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list walking into a bar in Washington, D.C. and smacking around a couple of their agents?” Phillips asked, surveying the scene briefly before letting his gaze fall back on me. “Of course you haven’t. Because it doesn’t happen. And if it did, the criminal in question damned sure wouldn’t have gotten away afterward!” He raised his voice loud enough to include several other people in the immediate vicinity in our conversation. I glanced behind me and saw Augustus looking over at me from where he was talking to one of the local cops. He raised an eyebrow at me and I quickly looked away, back to Phillips, whose face was slightly red.

“Well, if the FBI had as one of their nemeses a guy who could shrug off bullets like some of us ignore parking citations,” I said, “maybe that would happen more often. It’s not like I could just shoot Serafini and be done with the problem.”

I could see Phillips chafing under that argument, like he wanted to burst free and fight it out some more. “Where did he go?”

“I’ve got J.J. working the traffic and other surveillance cameras in the area,” I said, “but it looks like he found a gap in them and waltzed off.” That was true, and Anselmo had done it very quickly after making it out of the empty storefront, almost like he was being guided by someone who knew where the cameras were located. “I doubt we’re going to find anything.”

Phillips watched me carefully. “You think he has help.”

I nodded. “I think he’s working with the Brain, the one who masterminded the Federal Reserve heist and the subsequent jailbreak. Probably Eric Simmons, too, because we’ve had zero notice on either of them since they disappeared in January. That just doesn’t happen in the modern world. Everyone leaves an electronic trail—whether it’s on cameras or some other way. Someone’s covering for these guys, helping them escape our notice.”

“Making us look like idiots,” Phillips said, tearing slightly looser of the restraint he’d shown before. “What’s Anselmo’s game?”

“Axe to grind with me or us,” I said, shaking my head, a little more casual now that Phillips was pointing his irritation elsewhere. I frowned, remembering something he’d said. “He said his quarrel with Sienna was done.” I scratched my hairline on my right temple, where a little itch was starting. I hadn’t really thought about this after he’d said it, but now that I was, I started to feel a little uneasy.

“Done how?” Phillips asked, still sweeping the scene with his eyes. His faint blondish hair was being turned red and then blue by all the flashing lights.

“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. “I have a hard time imagining he’s done anything to her.” I started to feel nervous, then dropped it. Sienna could beat the living crap out of Anselmo with one hand tied behind her back. Maybe both.

Phillip' s eyes were heavily lidded. He looked tired. “Might want to warn her, in case he’s got ill intent.”

“I can’t imagine Anselmo ever having good intent,” I said and started to walk away, fumbling for my phone.

“Get back to the agency when you’re done,” Phillips said, tossing the order after me. I turned and watched him beeline for the police commander, who was talking with the fire commander on scene. He didn’t follow up on it, and part of me wondered why he’d bothered with it at all.

“Whatever,” I muttered to myself. I’d head back to the agency, all right, because there wasn’t any point in just standing around in the north metro waiting for something to happen. Besides, now that rush hour was over, I could be here in half an hour, tops, if anything went awry during the night.

I looked at the screen on my phone as I walked back toward the car, making a gesture for Augustus to follow me. He disentangled himself from conversation with the cop he’d been talking to and threaded his way through the crowd toward me as I pushed the button to call someone who I hadn’t actively called in several months. I listened to as it went straight to voicemail.