Love on the Run

  “Quite a lot of hysterical outburst. Nothing I’d call useful.” He smiled with a little twist of his mouth. “Forensics will be going over to her yard next to take more pictures. It’s fairly obvious where the fellow got in, and where he crouched in the shrubbery. She really should get a safety gate between her and the street.”

  “I bet she does after this. She’ll probably call a contractor first thing in the morning.”

  “Good. By the way, the first officers here put out an all-points for that motorcycle. I don’t suppose they’ll bring him in, but they’ll try.”

  I returned to the living room to wait some more. Finally, after an hour or so, all the police left but Sanchez. He lingered for a moment on the front porch to fill Ari and me in.

  “We’re putting out a warrant for this Trasker guy. O’Grady, your sister is pretty sure he was dealing drugs. Meth, probably. They were living out in Livermore, and the suburbs are full of housewives snorting crystal meth to lose weight.” Sanchez rolled his eyes in disgust. “He’s threatened her life and threatened the children, so she needs to get a lawyer, come to court, and get a restraining order put on the SOB.”

  “How seriously does your department take those?” Ari said.

  Sanchez shrugged. “I don’t know anything about domestic violence cases. I can find out for you.”

  “I’d appreciate it,” Ari said. “She is my sister-in-law, or will be shortly.”

  My stomach clenched in sheer terror. Restraining orders only work when someone respects the law. Chuck didn’t. Maureen had told me that he used his own illegal substances, and methedrine does not a level head make.

  “You think the shooter was Trasker?” I said.

  “He’s a likely suspect,” Sanchez said. “Who do you think the intended victim was?”

  “I don’t know. He was such a bad shot that we were both in danger.”

  Sanchez laughed with one wry bark. “Be glad he was. If he was a sure shot like Nathan here, you’d both be dead.”

  On that happy note he left.

  If the shooter had been aiming for me, I had a list of possible suspects, but how could I have given it to Sanchez? The possibilities included: 1) a member of an alien species evolved from leopards who lived on a deviant level of the multiverse; 2) the human ally of a gang of criminal psychic squid from an alternate Venus; 3) a minion of the Chaos masters that my agency’s sworn to oppose—species to be determined later. Better that the police blamed Chuck the Scum, who needed to be taken off the streets whether he’d fired the shots or not.

  Ari went to talk with Uncle Jim while I returned to the living room and Maureen. I sat down in the chair next to hers just as Sophie came downstairs. She told us that she was going to help Aunt Eileen clean up the kitchen.

  “That’s good of you,” Maureen said. “I should help, too.”

  “No, it’s okay. I like helping.” Sophie glanced my way. “You’ve all done so much for me.”

  I merely smiled for an answer. Maureen didn’t need to know that Aunt Eileen and Michael had rescued Sophie from a life on the streets as a prostitute—not that Michael’s motives were pure. You can’t expect purity from a seventeen-year-old boy.

  “The kids are okay,” Sophie continued. “They’re playing some game where you collect jewels.”

  “Sounds good,” Maureen said. “I’ll stay here, then. I want to talk to Nola.”

  Sophie trotted off toward the kitchen. I waited until she’d gotten out of earshot.

  “Mo,” I said, “did you really tell the cops about Chuck’s dealing?”

  “You bet I did. I figured they’ll arrest him and keep him away from us.”

  “They will if they can find him. But in the meantime, if he finds you, you’ve just put yourself in a lot of danger.”

  “I’m already in a lot of danger.” Her voice dropped to a frightened whisper. “Nola, he said he’d kill me for leaving him, and I believe him. He wasn’t just bluffing.” She paused to gulp for breath. “Besides, how’s he going to find out? That I was the informer, I mean.”

  “Who else?”

  “His damned druggie partners, maybe. He owes them a lot of money.”

  “Oh, good! Maybe they’ll off him and get rid of him for us.”

  “As long as they don’t come after me for the cash.”

  “Crud! Mo, look, we may have to get you into a witness protection program.”

  “Maybe so.” Her voice squeaked as it ran into tears. “I don’t know what I ever saw in him. I didn’t know he was so into drugs when we got together. Really I didn’t.” She fished a Kleenex out of her skirt pocket and wiped her eyes. “Those protection programs—I’d have to move somewhere away from here, away from all of you guys. I want to be close to the family.”

  “Well, as our Aunt Rose says, we’ll burn that bridge when we’re crossing it.”

  Maureen managed to smile.

  “Let’s get you and the kids home for tonight, anyway,” I said. “In the morning Mom will find you a lawyer, and you can get that restraining order on the record.”

  I phoned my father and gave him the all clear. At that time he and my mother were living in a big flat up on Diamond Heights, a neighborhood of condos and apartment blocks on the southeast flank of Twin Peaks, maybe fifteen minutes away from Aunt Eileen’s by car. Dad arrived a bare couple of minutes after I called him, because he’s what we call a “fast walker,” that is, he can shorten any journey by what amounts to teleportation. He can also bring others with him on these jaunts. Although he’s not precisely sure how the process works, he’s been told that he can “generate a field” that does the carrying.

  “I thought I’d best take Maureen and the kids home the direct way,” he told me. “That bastard Chuck might be laying for her somewhere near the flat. He must know what her car looks like. I don’t want to drive up and have him fill the thing full of bullets.”

  “Good thought,” I said. “She can pick it up tomorrow.”

  “No, I’ll pick it up tomorrow. When it’s light, and Chuck can see who’s driving.”

  Maureen called up the staircase to the children. When they refused to leave their game, she had to go up to fetch them. Michael solved the problem by turning off his computer, and everyone trooped down again. The August night had turned chilly with the usual summer fog. Maureen got the kids into jackets and accepted a sack of leftovers from Aunt Eileen.

  “Is Ben going to shoot at the car?” Caitlin asked.

  “No,” Dad answered. “We’re not going by car.”

  Brennan wrinkled his nose. “The bus?” he said.

  “No,” Maureen said. “Granddad is magic. You’ll see.” She glanced my way. “They’ve gotten the family lecture, of course, the one about keeping secrets.”

  “Lots of times.” Caitlin laid her hand over her heart. “What’s family stays in the family.”

  “We saw that on TV,” Brennan put in. “About some dumb city somewhere. Granddad, are you really magic?”

  “Yes.” Dad winked at Maureen. “And I’m about to show you a trick, so you’ll know it’s true.”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow, Mo,” I said. “Hang in there!”

  As they left the house, the kids each took one of Dad’s hands, and Maureen followed close behind him. About halfway down the front steps to the street, they all disappeared in a shimmer of pale blue light, that mysterious field, I supposed, that he generated.

  “It really is useful to have Flann back,” Aunt Eileen said as she shut the front door. “And your mother’s certainly much more pleasant to have around now that he’s home.”

  “That’s for sure. I’ve seen her twice in two weeks, and we haven’t had a fight yet.”

  There remained the problem of getting me home safely. Ari and I lived on the opposite side of San Francisco, out in the fog belt of the Sunset district close to the ocean. We had a heavily modified car that his mysterious agency had supplied. It looked like an ordinary Saturn, but it carried armor under its plas
tic shell and had a few other distinctive features as well. It could outrun and outmaneuver any assassin on a motorcycle.

  The difficulty came down to the driver. Ari is Israeli. He drives like an Israeli—no, that’s not fair to most Israelis. Make that “like the macho Israeli guy he is.” Until recently, I’d done all the driving rather than risk death from friendly fire every time we got into the car. Unfortunately, a few weeks earlier someone had thrown an illusion into the path of the car. Had we been in traffic at the time, I would have swerved into a nasty accident. Ari does not see psychic illusions. Ari, in fact, can be absolutely dense about psychic anythings, which in this case proved to be a definite plus.

  When I said that someone tried to kill me that night, I didn’t mean the shooting incident.

  We left Aunt Eileen’s with him at the wheel and drove down Silver Avenue to Alemany, where he cut off three drivers in fast traffic and swerved violently into the left lane. In a blare of horns we turned off onto a side street. Eventually, we reached O’Shaughnessy, which would take us across Twin Peaks and out to the western edge of the city where we lived. This particularly long street runs along the edge of a shallow valley called, with a profound lack of imagination, O’Shaughnessy Hollow. A steep drop-off falls down to high grass studded with nasty looking rocks, on your right if you’re traveling uphill, which we were.

  Ari had just swerved around another car when I saw a truck barreling toward us in the wrong lane, our lane. I screamed before I could choke it back. Between perception and rational thought lies a dangerous interval. Ari kept going at top speed and drove right through the false image.

  “What did you see?” he remarked. “Something ghastly, I suppose.”

  “A semi in the wrong lane.” My pounding heart began to slow down. “Sorry about the shrieking.”

  Ari laid on the horn and swung around a white sedan that was traveling too slowly for his taste. My heart sped up again, especially when I looked into the rearview mirror and saw a police car, lights flashing, trying to pull us over. I said nothing. It vanished. What would have happened, I wondered, if I’d been driving and stopped? Who might have appeared for real to work a little mayhem?

  A third illusion followed later. We’d turned onto Sloat Boulevard out in the avenues when I saw flashing lights, flares, and what appeared to be a six-car pileup ahead.

  “Do you see that accident?” I said to Ari.

  “No. Is there one?”

  “Not if you can’t see it.”

  He drove straight on and passed right through the shadowy cars and flares. I turned to look back and saw nothing but empty street.

  Despite the excitement we reached home safely. When we’d been looking for a place to live, we’d had two requirements, a location close to the ocean and a building that we could occupy without putting other people in danger. Since most houses and apartment buildings out near the beach stand cheek by jowl in solid rows, we’d been lucky to find an anomaly: a building with a wide driveway on either side and an even wider empty space around back. It housed a pair of flats over a garage, which meant our front door stood at the top of a stairwell and thus was more secure than one opening onto the street. The building was an ugly example of local architecture—a stucco shoebox stuck on end would sum it up—but we could live in the top flat and leave the bottom one empty as a buffer zone between us and whoever might want to break and enter. If someone did firebomb or shoot up the place, the neighbors would remain reasonably safe.

  As a further precaution, Ari had installed a high-tech security system with the help of an old friend of his, a guy named Itzak Stein. We parked across the street from the building and sat in the car for a few minutes while we each ran a security check in our own way. He used his special smartphone to get a report on the technical system, and I ran a psychic Search Mode: Location. Both readings came up clear.

  “No more illusions, I should hope?” Ari said.

  “None so far.”

  “That illusion of a lorry you saw on the way home. If you’d been at the wheel, you might have pulled right off the road and over the edge of that drop-off. Should we bundle it with the first attempt on your life, or do you think it’s a separate occurrence?”

  “I’d vote for a separate attempt. That shooter probably was Maureen’s Unpleasant Ex. The attacks on me tend to be subtle. Chuck’s a basic type. A club would probably be his weapon of choice, but in the modern world a gun will do.”

  “Good point. Of course, you might have two different enemies trying to kill you.”

  “What a lovely thought! But you’re right. Let’s hope not.”

  “Hope’s not enough. I don’t intend to take any chances. We’ll just put the security system on high alert tonight.”

  “Good idea.” I considered possibilities. “I don’t suppose whoever sent the illusion wanted to kill you, and I was just incidental to the plan.”

  “Anyone who wanted to kill me would use a gun, not this psychic—” He hesitated. “Let’s just say, these overcomplicated methods.”

  “Psychic bullshit, you mean.”

  Rather than answer, Ari started the car and turned into the driveway. As he did so, the headlights swept across the front wall of the flats, a large pale blue stucco surface beloved by the local graffiti artists. Someone had spray-painted a couple of four-letter words while we’d been gone, but the wall was otherwise clear.

  We put the car into the garage and went upstairs to our typical San Francisco railroad flat: a living room with obligatory bay window at the front, and at the rear, a long hallway with the other rooms opening directly off it. We had a mismatched collection of furniture: an old blue couch, a couple of overly modern wooden armchairs with burgundy leather seats and back cushions, and a coffee table, all set around a beat-up Persian carpet. Opposite the couch stood a bookcase and a stand for the TV. In one corner I kept my computer, linked to a specially scrambled DSL line.

  Ari turned on the floor lamp that stood at the end of the couch. He took off his jacket and tossed it onto the coffee table, then lifted his arms over his head and stretched out his back. I admired the display. He’s not movie-star handsome, but he’s macho gorgeous, to my way of thinking anyway. He has dark, curly hair and deep, dark eyes that remind me of a Byzantine icon. He also works out a lot, and it shows. I glanced at the clock: a little early to go to bed, maybe.

  “I really should see if there’s any e-mail from the Agency,” I said. “I hope Seymour’s gotten his butt in gear. That vision I had keeps nagging at me, and I need him to interpret it.”

  “Which vision? You have so many.”

  “The one about the possible end of a world. The one with the corpses.”

  “Oh. That vision.”

  “Not a happy one.”

  “Do you ever have happy visions?”

  “No. Sorry.”

  Ari sighed and strode out of the room. I heard him heading down the hall toward the bathroom. I sat down at my computer desk. Before I could boot up the desktop, an image began to form on the monitor screen. Occasionally I received psychic communications from an entity who lived in a parallel world, or a deviant world level as the Agency termed them. This particular sending followed the standard procedure. First the familiar black circle appeared with its seven arrows, four protruding from the top half, three from the bottom. Once it was fully formed, the circle turned into the image of the shaved head and stern-eyed face of the man I called Cryptic Creep. For some months now he’d been contacting me at random intervals, and always for a few brief moments at a time.

  “You again, huh?” I spoke aloud. “What is it now?”

  He answered psychically. “We must discuss this business of the Yaldaboathian heresy.”

  Even in psychic communication, he had a strange voice—high and fluting.

  “Why?” I said. “I don’t believe in Yaldaboath.”

  “That is a great relief. I was afraid that you were backsliding.” He smiled, and at that moment he reminded me strongly
of my priestly uncle, Father Keith. “Then why did you tell me that it created the universe?”

  It took me a couple of moments to remember our last conversation, in which he’d quizzed me about various religious beliefs.

  “What is this,” I said. “Catechism?”

  “Of course. Who—”

  “Oh, okay!” I made my answer up on the spur of the moment. “The Peacock Angel under the direction of the Invisible Highest.”

  His grin broadened. I could have sworn he was smiling upon me with deep affection, just as Father Keith would have—except that I would have trusted Father Keith.

  “Good enough,” he said. “I can stop worrying, then. I was afraid you’d gone over to our enemies.”

  “Our enemies?” I said. “Are you telling me we’re on the same side?”

  “Side? I wouldn’t put things in those terms. There are a great many more than two sides to these questions. Nola, come back home! You need to speak with me face-to-face.”

  “Rather than indistinctly through a mirror, huh?”

  He frowned, puzzled.

  “Okay,” I said, “maybe you know that in the other translation: now we see as through a glass darkly.”

  His eyes widened, his mouth slacked, and he snorted.

  “From one heresy to another,” he said. “I take it fragments of that drivel survive there.”

  “Fragments? No, four canonical gospels and a lot of Paul’s letters, plus history books and some deviant gospels. It’s one of the dominant religions where I live.”

  “Worse and worse! Nola, you absolutely must join me. Your soul is in grave danger of damnation.”

  “Oh, come off it! You’re a fine one to talk. Why are you using an unbalanced Chaos symbol to contact me?”

  His grin vanished. “What?”

  “The circle with seven arrows. Or doesn’t it mean unbalanced force?”

  “It certainly doesn’t! It represents the inherent dynamism of the universe, the striving toward consciousness of all matter.”

  This revelation left me speechless. I remembered just how complicated inter-world communication could be. Take nothing for granted, O’Grady, I told myself. Nothing, nada, zip. From the circle on my monitor he watched me, narrow-eyed.