Weather Warden - Chill Factor Part 13

G.o.d, 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 a.s.signment 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 sungla.s.ses. 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d, you're not getting away with this. . . .

The man down in the arroyo looked up, and the aviator gla.s.ses 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 gla.s.s winking in the dawn light.

It was a G.o.dd.a.m.n drug deal gone bad. This was what Chaz had been protecting. Murder.

"You b.a.s.t.a.r.d," 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.

SIX.

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 smelled of spilled oil and hot metal. There was a wet softness underneath me, and that smelled like blood. Mine. My head was bleeding like a son of a b.i.t.c.h, 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d limb from limb . . . that one was actually pretty attractive. I felt around and found nothing to use to pop the trunk- no tire iron, which was unfortunate; I'd feel a h.e.l.l 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 facedown 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 toward 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 sc.r.a.ped 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 1-70. A petulant burst of wind blew past us, stinging me with sand.

"What the h.e.l.l-" I began, but he held out both hands, palm out, to stop me.

"I can explain. Everything. Just . . . don't do that again, okay?" 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 s.h.i.+mmering road. "Just get in the car, okay? 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 pa.s.senger side of the car, which I now saw was his roadmonster 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 b.u.mp on the head; maybe you imagined-"

"Bulls.h.i.+t."

"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 a.s.s 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 a.s.s? 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, okay?

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 d.a.m.ned 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 h.e.l.l he'd gotten 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 h.e.l.l 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 smelled funny.

"Did the others see a woman get killed?" Her hands, scrabbling at the dirt, fumbling for rescue. "What'd she do, Chaz? Shortchange the s.h.i.+pment? 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? G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 h.e.l.l 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. n.o.body else dies."

Chaz sent me a pitying look. He reached down, picked up a cell phone that lay on the seat between us, and dialed 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, okay? 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 pa.s.sed a flas.h.i.+ng blur of a road sign that read CARLSON CAVES, 1 MILE. 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 matchup. We could hurt each other, all right, but we'd hurt everybody else a h.e.l.l 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 pa.s.senger door; the phone clattered noisily against window gla.s.s and slid into the dim recesses of the backseat. f.u.c.k. I was committed. Too late for caution now . . .

I called wind.