Текст книги "Windfall"

Автор книги: Rachel Caine

Соавторы: Rachel Caine
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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

As if he’d followed my thought, his hand on my back went still. I felt a shudder run through him, and his eyes dimmed just a little.

“David?” I sat up. He eased back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

“I shouldn’t have done this to you,” he said. “I should never have done any of this to you. You deserve—”

“Don’t do this to yourself. None of it is your fault.”

He closed his eyes. He looked suddenly very, very tired. Human. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

“No! God, no.” I put my hand on his chest, then my head. My hair spilled dark over his skin. “Well, not any more than I wanted you to, anyway.”

“I’m afraid I will,” he said. His voice sounded distant, worn smooth by exhaustion. “No, I know I will; I can sense it.” His eyes opened, and the last embers of copper flared in orange swirls. “You can’t let me. I mean it, Jo. You have to have defenses against me. You have to learn…”

The fire was cooling under his skin, the light in him going out. “I have to go now,” he said. “I love you.”

I kissed him, quickly, lovingly, and said, “I love you, too. Go back in the bottle now.”

I felt the sudden indrawn breath of his passing, sank suddenly down in the welter of disordered sheets, and when I opened my eyes again he was gone.

Nothing left but an indentation in the pillows.

I turned over, slid open the nightstand drawer, and took his bottle out of its protective zippered case lined with gray foam.

I started to put the stopper in, but then hesitated. At some very deep level, he was still part of me, drawing on the magic I possessed; putting the stopper in the bottle meant cutting that connection, and although he hadn’t said so, I suspected that the more I could give him, the better. I’d have opened my magical veins if it could have made him better. Hell, I wasn’t in the Wardens anymore; I wasn’t directing the weather or saving lives. I was just a poverty-level member of the vast, unwashed paid labor force.

I needed him for completely different reasons these days than making miracles happen for other people.

I sank back on the pillows with a sigh. I didn’t actually know if he was recovering, or, if he was, how quickly; I’d need the opinion of another Djinn to find out, but then, none of the Djinn had been around to visit since I’d left the Wardens. They were staying clear. I figured Jonathan had something to do with it. The last thing he’d said to me, in a flat, angry monotone, had been, You broke him, you fix him. The unspoken or else had been daunting.

Jonathan hadn’t dropped by since I’d returned to Florida, but with the kinds of powers he possessed, he hardly needed to. He was probably back in his house, watching me through his big plate-glass picture window and sipping magically imported beer.

Probably watching me right now.

I rolled over on my back, flipped the bird at the ceiling.

“Hope you enjoyed the show,” I said. “No encores.”

No reaction. Which was no doubt for the best.

I fell asleep with the bottle beside me, to the steady, pounding whisper of the surf down on the beach.

I catapulted out of bed two hours later to a banging on the apartment door. I was halfway to the door before I realized I was stark naked. Back to the bedroom to throw on a floor-length silk robe, belted in front, and jam my feet into slippers.

“Coming!” I yelled, and hustled back as the knocking continued to thunder. I started to rip the door open, then hesitated and used the peephole.

It took me about ten seconds—long, full ones—to realize who I was looking at, because she didn’t look like herself at all.

Oh. My. God.

I unlocked the dead bolt and flung the door wide. “Sarah?”

My sister was standing there. My sister from California, my married, nonmagical sister who, the last time I’d seen her, had been wearing the best of Rodeo Driveand sporting a designer haircut with fabulous highlights. Sarah had been one of those annoying girls who’d spent all her time scheming to catch a rich man, and … amazingly… had actually doneit. I hadn’t expected her to be happy, but I had expected her to hang on to her French millionaire husband with both hands and emotional superglue.

Lots had obviously changed. Sarah was wearing baggy, wrinkled khaki shorts and an oversized Sunshine State T-shirt; the haircut had grown into an unkempt shag, and the remaining, faded highlights looked cheap as tinsel. No makeup. And no socks with her battered running shoes.

“Let me in,” she said. She sounded tired. With no will of my own I stepped back, and she came in, dragging a suitcase behind her.

The suitcase—battered, ugly, and bargain-basement—gave me a bad, bad feeling.

“I thought you were in LA,” I said slowly. The door was still open, and I reluctantly shut and locked it. There went my last chance for a decent escape. I tried for a pleasant interpretation. “Missed me, huh?”

She plumped down on my secondhand couch in an uncoordinated sprawl, staring down at her limp hands, which hadn’t seen a manicure in weeks. My sister was a good-looking woman—walnut brown hair, blue eyes, fine, soft skin she’d worked hard to keep supple—but just now she looked her age. Wrinkles. My God. Sarah had wrinkles. And she hadn’t been to a plastic surgeon and Botoxed them out of existence? Who are you and what have you done with my evil sibling?

“Chrêtien left me,” she said. “He left me for a personal trainer!”

I felt behind me, found a chair, and sank into it, staring at her.

“He divorced me,” she said. Her already-tense voice was rising like a flood tide. “And he enforced the prenup. Jo, he took the Jag!”

That came out as a true, raw wail of grief.

My sister—who’d always made me look like a piker when it came to composure, style, and taking care of herself—blubbered like a little girl. I jumped up and found some Kleenex, which she promptly used with enthusiasm, and fetched a trash can from the bathroom to catch the soggy remains. I was notpicking those up.

Finally, she was blotched, swollen, red-nosed, and done crying—for a while—and gave me the rest of the tired, familiar story. Chrêtien and personal trainer Heather (Heather? Really?), meeting every Tuesday for a really intense private session. Sarah getting suspicious because his workout clothes never seemed overly worked out. Hiring a private eye to follow them. Dirty pictures.

Screaming confrontation. Chrêtien invoking the dire terms of the prenup, which had taken her house, her car, her bank account, and left her with her secondcar, an old Chrysler she’d let the maid use for errands.

And no place to live.

My once-rich sister was homeless.

And she was sitting on my couch with a suitcase, blubbering, looking at me with pleading, swollen eyes.

I silently returned the look, remembering all those childhood grievances. Sarah, yanking my hair when Mom wasn’t looking. Sarah, telling all my friends and enemies about my crush on Jimmy Paglisi. Sarah, stealing my first steady boyfriend out from under my nose. We weren’t close. We’d never been close. For one thing, we weren’t anything like the same. Sarah had been a professional woman… emphasis on the woman, not the professional. She’d set out to snare herself a millionaire, which she’d done, and to live the life she’d always wanted, and damn whoever had to suffer to get her there. She’d signed the prenup because, at the time, she’d thought she had Chrêtien completely beguiled and could get him to tear it up with enough honeyed compliments and blow jobs.

I could have told her—hell, I hadtold her—that Chrêtien was way too French for that to work.

Sarah was stranded on my couch: sniffling, humiliated, practically penniless. No marketable skills to speak of. No friends, because the kinds of country club friends Sarah had made all her life didn’t stick around after the platinum American Express got revoked.

She had nobody else. Nowhere to go.

There was nothing else I could say but, “Don’t worry. You can stay with me.”

Later, I would remember that and pound my head against the wall. It was the flickering warning light on a road where the bridge was out and, like an idiot, I just kept on driving.

Right into the storm.

I set about getting Sarah settled in my tiny spare room. She’d been weeping with gratitude right up until I heaved her suitcase onto the twin bed, but she stopped when she took a look around.

“Yes?” I asked sweetly, because I could see the words Where’s the rest of it?on the tip of her tongue.

She swallowed them—it must have choked her—and forced a trembling smile. “It’s great. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” I looked around, seeing it through her eyes. Her utility closet in California hadn’t been this small, I was certain. The furniture wasn’t exactly au courant—a rickety ’50s nightstand in grubby off-white French Provincial with a cockeyed drawer, a campus castoff bed too hard and lumpy for even college students. A scarred, ugly dresser of no particular pedigree, with missing drawer pulls and a cracked mirror, salvaged out of a Dumpster with the help of two semipro football players.

A real do-it-yourself nightmare.

I sighed. “Sorry about this. I had to move when—”

“—when we thought you were dead,” she said. “By the time they’d tracked me down to give me the news, your friends already knew you were all right and let me know, thank God, or I’d have just gone crazy.”

Which gave me a little bit of a warm, sisterly glow, until she continued.

“After all, I’d just found out about Chrêtien and Heather. I swear, if I’d had one more thing to think about, I don’t think even the therapy would have helped.”

I stopped feeling bad about the furniture. “Glad I didn’t set you back on the road to recovery.”

“Oh! No, I didn’t mean—”

I sat down on the bed next to her suitcase. The frame creaked and groaned like an exasperated geezer. “Look, Sarah, let’s not kid each other, okay? We’re not best buddies; we never were. I’m not judging you, I’m just saying you’re here because I’m all you’ve got. Right? So you don’t have to pretend to like me.”

She looked just like me, in that second—wide-eyed with surprise, and a little frown crinkling her forehead. Except for the hair. Even my current poodle-hair curls were better than the badly grown-out shag she was sporting.

She said, slowly, “All right, I admit it. I didn’t like you when you were younger. You were a bratty kid, and then you grew up into somebody I barely even know. And you’re weird, you know. And Mom liked you best.”

No arguing with that one. Mom really had.

But Sarah kept going. “That doesn’t mean I don’t love you, Jo. I always have loved you. I hope you still love me. I know I’m a bitch, and I’m shallow, but we’re still, you know, sisters.”

It would have been a warm, tender moment if I’d jumped up and thrown my arms around her and burst into tears. We weren’t that kind of Hallmark Card family.

I thought it over and said, “I don’t really know you, Sarah. But I’m willing to get to know you.”

She smiled. Slow, but real.

“That sounds… fair.”

We shook hands on it. I stood up and watched as Sarah unzipped the suitcase and started unpacking. It was a pitifully short affair. She’d left most of the good stuff behind, and what good stuff she had left was horribly wrinkled. We made a dry-clean pile, a “burn this” pile, a Goodwill pile, and a keeper stack. That one was short. It filled exactly one drawer of the dresser.

“Makeup?” I asked. She pointed to a tiny plastic case that couldn’t have held more than lipstick, mascara, and maybe an eyebrow pencil. “Shoes?”

She pointed to the battered running shoes and held up a pair of black, squarish pumps, something suitable for a grandmother, so long as Grandma didn’t care much about appearances. I winced. “The bastard didn’t even let you keep your shoes?”

“He cleaned out the house and gave everything to the Salvation Army,” she said. “All my clothes. Everything.”

“Jesus.” I had a sudden flare of suspicion. “Um, look, Sarah, not that I’m doubting you or anything, but wasn’t Chrêtien the, um, guilty party… ?”

She had the good grace to look just a littleashamed. “He found out about Carl.”

“Carl?”

“You know.”

“Nope. Really don’t.”

She rolled her eyes. “Fine, if you’re going to force me to say it… I wasn’t exactly guiltless. There. I admit it. I was having an affair with his business partner.”

“Jesus.”

“And the donkey he rode in on,” she finished, just the way she’d always done it when we’d been in school. “But he didn’t have to get so personalabout all of it. He cheated on me, after all. You’d think he’d at least understand that it was… well…”

“Recreational?” I supplied dryly.

“Yes! Exactly!”

“Should have joined the bridge club, Sarah.”

She gave me a helpless, angry look. “I’m not saying I was guiltless, but… he gave me a couple of hundred dollars and told me to buy replacements. In my new price range. God, Jo, I didn’t even know where to shop!”

I took a deep breath and said, “Tell you what? I was going to the mall anyway with a friend, so if you want to get ready—”

“I’m ready,” my sister said instantly.

I picked up the phone and called Cherise.

Cherise had, of course, changed clothes in the interim. She’d gone to a magenta see-through mesh shirt with lime green tie-dyed patterns, over a lime green camisole. It all matched the lime glitter toenail polish, which evidently she liked enough to accessorize to.

“Ten,” I said instantly when she got out of her red convertible. “Maybe a ten point five. You blind me with your magnificence.”

“But of course. Man, Jo, I knew you were a saint, but you gave up your hottie for your sister? Damn. I’d have blown off taking my grandma to dialysis for that man!”

Sarah came out of the apartment behind me, wearing her wrinkled khaki walking shorts and badly fitting button-down shirt. Cherise’s perfectly made-up eyes widened into something usually seen only in Japanese animation.

“Oh my God,” she said, and looked at me in horror. “You told me it was bad, but damn, this is a seven point five on the fashion disaster scale. And what’s with her hair?”

“Cherise,” I said. “I know it’s hard for you, but please. Sarah’s had a bad time. Be kind.”

“I was being kind. That is way worse than a seven point five.”

Sarah said, “Jo? Did she just say you have a boyfriend?”

Trust Sarah, of course, to blow past Cherise’s fluff to get to the potentially disastrous part of the conversation.

“Not justa boyfriend,” Cherise said. “Boyfriends are Ken dolls. Boyfriends are safe. Her guy is the kind of hottie who needs to keep a fire extinguisher around, just to hose down any passing women who spontaneously combust.”

I stared at her, amazed. For Cherise, this was, well, poetic.

Sarah was, meanwhile, frowning at me. “And you didn’t tell me about him?”

I didn’t want to bring up David yet. That was going to be a strange and difficult conversation, with somebody as earthbound-normal as Sarah, and I couldn’t really mislead her too far. Trying to keep him secret would only lead to low comedy and farce. Not to mention put a serious cramp in my love life.

“He had to leave,” I said. Not a lie. “I’ll see him later.”

“I should have known you’d have a boyfriend,” Sarah said. She sounded bitter. “What was I thinking? When do you not?”

“Kind of a ’ho, isn’t she?” Cherise asked. Sarah nodded wisely.

“Hey!” I said sharply. “Watch it!”

“Oh, come on, Jo. Your libido isn’t exactly on the low end of the curve. I’ve seen you checking out the boys at work,” Cherise said. “Even, you know, Kurt. The anchor.”

“I would never! That man is made of plastic!”

“Oh, the plastic ones are the best,” she said, and gave me a wicked look. “They come with D-cell batteries, off switches, and you never have to meet their folks.”

Cherise worried me sometimes. “Please tell me you haven’t—not with Kurt—”

“Please. I have standards,” she said. “He may be an anchor, but he’s a morninganchor. Hardly worth the investment.”

“Now who’syour boyfriend?” Sarah began again. I hustled her toward the car.

Cherise broke ranks, rushed back, and flipped switches in her convertible. The canvas top whirred up and locked in place.

“Marvin says it’s going to rain,” she said.

“Marvin doesn’t know his—” I bit my tongue to keep from saying something that might get back to him. “His meteorology from a rain dance.”

Cherise looked up at the cloudless blue sky, shrugged, and slid on her dark glasses. “Yeah, well, easy for you to say. You don’t have to wet-vac. And you know all about the Percentage.”

Yes. They liked to use that in advertising: Trust the Percentage. Because Marvelous Marvin really did have the best percentage of forecast accuracy in our area. Not that it was anything but blind luck. I’d asked him to walk me through the calculations for his rainy-day forecast two days ago, and he’d happily brought out the charts, the National Weather Service models, the radar images, all the good stuff… and proceeded to come to exactly the wrong conclusion.

But he was 91% percent accurate over the last two years.

Hard to argue with that, but I lived in hopes that today, at least, would be the beginning of the end of Marvin’s reign of meteorological omniscience.

We piled into the Viper and headed for Shopping Nirvana, otherwise known as the Galleria—150 shops, with everything from Sak’s to Neiman Marcus. I both loved and hated living so close to it. It was like a diabetic with a sweet tooth living next door to the fudge factory. We cruised along, drawing envious stares from teenagers in gleaming low-riders, faded Yuppies in Volvos, soccer moms in enormous SUVs. Mona was a sexy car. I still pined for my beloved Mustang, but I had to admit, the throbbing growl of power from the Viper was seductive.

Even doing something as tame as crawling from one red light to another on this cloudless suburban day.

We’d only gone about three blocks when Sarah suddenly said, “Did you know you’re being followed?”

We were heading down East Sunshine, and the traffic wasn’t exactly light; I looked at her in the rearview (she’d been relegated to the back) and studied her carefully. “Okay, you’ve been living in California way too long. This is Florida. We don’t get tailed in Florida.”

She didn’t look behind her as she said, “Chrêtien had me followed for six months; I know what I’m talking about. There’s a white van with dark-tinted windows and a magnetic sign that says it’s from a flower shop. It pulled out of the apartment parking lot when you did. It’s three cars back.”

I blinked and focused on the traffic. She was right, there was a white van back there. I couldn’t see anything about the sides, but the windows were dark-tinted.

“So? He dropped off some roses. Unfortunately, not to me.” And I so deserved it, for putting up with Sarah.

“Change lanes,” she said. “Watch him.”

Couldn’t hurt. I spotted an opening and did one of those sports-car levitation glides laterally from one lane to another, no signal, and then sped up and whipped back over two lanes. Cherise yelped and grabbed for a handhold; Sarah turned to look back, just a quick glance.

“He’s following, but he’s trying to look casual about it,” she said. I nodded.

It wasn’t easy to do in traffic, but I split my attention and sent part of myself up into Oversight, to see what was going on in the aetheric.

It wasn’t a Warden behind us, at least. Nothing but normal human stuff happening, not even the faint smear I’d come to recognize as a Djinn who didn’t want to be spotted. I dropped back into my body, put my foot down, and felt Mona respond with a fast, eager purr. “Hang on,” I said, and whipped the wheel over hard at the next light. Cherise yelped again, higher-pitched; Sarah grabbed for a handhold and tilted without making a sound.

“Hey!” Cherise blurted. “This isn’t the way to the mall!” She was much more panicked about the idea of missing her shopping appointment than any sinister, faceless stalker we might have picked up.

Hey, I never said she was deep. Just fun to be around.

“Back entrance,” I said. The van turned the corner, a block behind me, and accelerated. I eased back down to a regular street speed, mindful of any cops that might be lurking and itching for a chance to ticket a Viper, and made another turn, to the left.

I took the turn into the Galleria parking lot. It was a typical day, which meant busy; I cruised around for a while, watching for the white van. It was still back there. When I pulled into a space, so did it, several rows away.

All very sinister, suddenly. I didn’t like it at all.

“Cherise, you take Sarah and go on to Ann Taylor,” I said, and popped my door open. “I’ll be right behind you. Sarah, you’ve got my Mastercard. Just—don’t buy big ticket without me.” I realized that Sarah’s standards of big ticket might vary from mine. “Um… that means anything over a hundred dollars.”

She looked briefly shocked, probably at the low-limit amount. Both of them started to argue, but I slammed the door and kept walking, fast and purposefully, heading for the white van that was parked and motionless several hundred yards away. I made sure to stay blocked from it as much as possible by giant SUVs—who the hell needsa Hummer the color of a yield sign, anyway?—and the ubiquitous Gran-and-Gramps-do-Florida RVs, and came at it from the passenger side.

I knocked on the dark-tinted window. After a few silent seconds, a motor whirred and the glass glided down.

I didn’t recognize the man in the driver’s seat. He was Hispanic, older—forty, forty-five maybe—and he had graying hair, fierce, dead dark eyes, and a windburned complexion.

Looked damn intimidating.

“Hi,” I said, and gave him my best, most confident smile. “Want to tell me why you’re following me? If this is about Sarah, tell Chrêtien that he can stick it up his French…”

“You’re Joanne Baldwin,” he interrupted me. No trace of an accent.

“In the flesh.” Scars and all, which had fortunately faded with a little help from silicone patches and the tanning salon.

“Get in the van,” he said.

“Oh, I really don’t think—”

He produced a gun and aimed it at my head. “No, I really do.” I wasn’t good with guns, especially not identifying them, but this one looked big and serious about its job. “In the van. Now, please.”

I felt an overwhelming impulse to do exactlywhat he said, but I also knew better than to climb into some stranger’s van. Especially in Florida. I tried to focus past the gun and hold his stare. “It’s broad daylight in a mall parking lot. You’re not going to shoot me, and I’m not getting in your damn van, either. Next subject.”

I surprised him. It passed over his face in a flash. Blink and you’d miss it, but it was definitely present. He cocked one eyebrow just a millimeter higher.

“Why exactly do you think I wouldn’t shoot you?”

“Security cameras everywhere, pal, and my sister and my friend both have really good memories for license plate numbers. You wouldn’t get back to the main road before the cops cut you off.” I forced myself to smile again. “Besides, you don’t want me dead, or you’d have shot me already and been out of here, and we wouldn’t be having this lovely conversation.”

For a long, long second, he debated it. I held my breath, and let it slowly out when he shrugged and holstered the gun again, with a move so deft it might as well have been a magic trick.

“You know my name,” I said. “Want to tell me yours?”

“Armando Rodriguez,” he replied, which took meby surprise; I hadn’t expected a guy who’d just pulled a weapon to introduce himself so readily. “Detective Armando Rodriguez, Las Vegas Police Department.”

Oh, dear. I felt goosebumps shiver up the back of my arms.

“I’d like to ask you a few questions about the disappearance of Detective Thomas Quinn,” he said. Which I’d already figured out.

Too bad I knew exactlywhat had happened to Detective Thomas Quinn. And there was no way on earth I could talk to this guy about it.

“Thomas Quinn?” I didn’t want to out-and-out lie, but the truth was a nonstarter. “Sorry, I don’t think I know the name.”

Rodriguez opened up a folder stuck in the side pocket of his driver’s side door and slid out a collection of photos—grainy, obviously off of surveillance cameras. Me, in a black miniskirt, being escorted by Detective Thomas Quinn.

“Want to try that one again?” he asked.

“I hear everybody has a double,” I said. “Maybe you’ve got the wrong girl.”

“Oh, I don’t think so.”

“Prove it.”

“You drive a blue Dodge Viper. Funny thing—we had a report of a blue Dodge Viper driving away from an area in the desert where Quinn’s SUV was found burned.” His dark eyes kept their level stare on me. “His truck was destroyed, like somebody had loaded it up with dynamite, but we didn’t find any trace of explosives.”

I lifted one shoulder, let it fall, and just looked at him. He looked back.

After a moment, he let one corner of his mouth lift in a slow, predatory smile.

It didn’t soften the harsh, hard eyes.

Quinn had managed to look coplike and friendly at the same time. Rodriguez just looked coplike, and didn’t bother with any warm-and-fuzzy bullshit to make me feel better.

“Quinn was a friend of mine,” he said softly. “I intend to find out what happened to him. If anybody did him harm, I’m going to see that that person suffers for it. You understand me?”

“Oh, I understand,” I said. “Good luck with that.”

Any friend of Quinn’s was definitelynot going to be a friend of mine.

I pushed off from the car and walked away, heels clicking, hair ruffling in the breeze. It was hot and turning sticky, but that wasn’t what was making the sweat run cold down my back.

In retrospect, becoming a television personality probably hadn’t been the best career choice I ever made, when a cop was missing and presumed dead, and I’d been the last one to be seen with him. Guess I should’ve thought of that. I’d spent too much time in the Wardens, where things got taken care of, and frictions with the rest of the mortal world were smoothed over with influence and cash and—sometimes—judicious use of Djinn.

Shit.I wondered about the Viper now. Since I’d actually stolen it off of a car lot in Oklahoma. Was it listed as hot? Or had Rahel, my friendly neighborhood free-range Djinn, taken care of erasing it from the records? She hadn’t bothered to mention it. I wasn’t sure how important she’d have found that, in the great scheme of things.

Hell, she’d probably think it was kind of funny if I got arrested. Djinn humor.

Very low.

I needed to take care of that, soon. I had the bad feeling that Armando Rodriguez wasn’t going to just go away, and if there was anything he could find as leverage, he’d start pushing. Hard.

Just as I started to think my day couldn’t get much worse, I heard a rumble from overhead, and saw that a thick bank of clouds had glided over the top of the mall while I was worrying about how not to get myself thrown in the slammer.

I stretched out a hand. A fat, wet drop hit my skin. It was as chilly as the water that the stagehands had dumped on me in the studio.

“No way,” I said, and looked up into the clouds. “You can’t be happening.”

It peppered me with a couple of drops more for evidence. Marvelous Marvin had been right after all. Somebody—somebody other than me, most certainly—had made damn sure he was right. Looking up on the aetheric, I could see the subtle signs of tampering, and the imbalance echoing through the entire BrowardCounty system. Worse than that, though, was the fact that as far as I could tell, there weren’t any other Wardens anywhere around. Just me. Me, who wasn’t supposed to be doing any kind of weather manipulation at all, under penalty of having my powers cut out of me with a dull knife.

I was sogoing to get blamed for this.

And, dammit, I didn’t even likeMarvin.