Before I could start, Nathan stepped forward and considered the windmill with narrowed eyes. When I followed his gaze, I noticed a vertical row of little unglazed windows, one for each story, I assumed. On the ground floor I could see a closed door.
“Could someone get inside there?” Nathan said.
“Only with one of the Parks Department people along. They keep it locked.”
“Good, but locks can be picked.”
“You should know.”
He smiled his tiger’s smile and began prowling around behind me, his suede jacket unzipped, his hands always close to the shoulder holster.
I assembled in my mind the few things I knew about Johnson’s confederate. I had only the information from Jerry, my trance contact with the adest daemona ritual, Nathan’s quick glimpse of Johnson’s getaway driver at the funeral, and my deduction about his lycanthropy from Pat’s journals. I wasn’t expecting much from the scan, but I hit pay dirt, or rather, pay dirt hit me.
As soon as I started, I realized I was drawing the vanes of the windmill, poking up from a sea of surrounding trees.
“Nathan?” I said as quietly as I could. “They’re right around here somewhere. To the east, I think. Back toward the main body of the park. Maybe on the road.”
Nathan turned in that direction with a slow, casual motion and peered into the thick foliage surrounding the east end of the sunken garden. I started a new drawing. The windmill loomed over the scene and the trees. My hand began superimposing a sleek black shape—a car—on the view.
“They’re parking on Kennedy Drive,” I said. “Right near here.”
We heard a car door creak open. A figure, male, appeared at the entrance to the garden.
Nathan spun around fast, and the pistol seemed to leap into his hand. I jumped up, scattering crayons, just in time to see a youngish, dark-haired man in dark slacks and a cream-colored shirt standing on the steps and staring our way. The way that the shirt caught the light said “raw silk” to me, an expensive little number, all right. I could feel DD’s shock at seeing us. I also picked up his wave of sheer terror as he turned and ran.
“Stop!” Nathan yelled. “Police!”
Nathan took off after him, yelling, “Police!” all the way. I focused my mind and got a clear image of DD’s back and head. More to the point I could feel him gasping on the point of panic as he raced up Kennedy Drive. For a few seconds I could see out of his eyes: the black Jag, its door open—I heard a shot and the squeal of brakes. I glimpsed Johnson, bent over the steering wheel as the Jag sped off with DD safely in the passenger seat. I heard another shot before Nathan came back, out of breath and furious.
“The bastard knows how to drive, all right,” he said between quick gasps for breath. “I was aiming for his tires or gas tank. He took evasive action. Professionally trained, I’d say.”
“If it’s any comfort,” I said, “I locked onto DD’s mind. I’ll know him from now on.”
“Good.” Nathan put the gun away and took his cell phone out of his pocket with a quick flip of his wrist. He punched a speed dial key. “Nathan from Interpol here.”
I left calling Sanchez to Nathan and knelt down on the grass to pick up my crayons. I’d just gotten everything back in my tote bag when I heard a siren wailing. Someone had reported those shots to the police, I assumed, and sure enough, two uniformed cops came running down the steps toward us. Nathan held his Interpol ID up where they could see it and trotted over to meet them.
I sat back down on the lawn and let my mind roam after DD and Johnson. By then they both had raised Shield Personas. Still, I received quick little flashes of the minds behind the shields, because they were distracted by an argument. I could pick up a constant natter of recrimination and general nastiness as they traveled farther and farther away, but their shields remained strong enough to turn aside any deep probe. I could tell that they were heading more or less south but nothing more. Ordinary reason told me that they’d probably turned onto the nearby Great Highway as they fled a possible police chase.
I returned my mind to the present location just as Nathan strode up. “They’re putting an all-points out for the Jag again,” he said. “Including the Highway Patrol. One of the officers told me that there’s some kind of major road—”
“The Great Highway, so called,” I said, pointing west. “A couple of blocks that way. And we’re close to the county line, so I’m real glad the Chips are involved.”
“The who?”
“Slang for the California Highway Patrol, sorry.”
Nathan acknowledged the explanation with a nod, then set his hands on his hips and stared off to the south for a moment. With a shrug he turned back to me.
“What did Sanchez say?” I asked.
“That he’d have the windmill searched. The two officers on scene are going to stay until he and his team can get here.”
“Do they want us to stay?”
“No.” The word sounded more like a snarl.
Sanchez, I assumed, had grown tired of Nathan telling him how to do his job. Nathan shoved his hands into his pockets and glared at the windmill.
“What now?” Nathan said. “There’s nothing more I can do here.”
“Well,” I said, “I’d like to go back to the Portals of the Past. We can be sure our perps won’t be lurking there.”
The sun hung low in the sky when we reached the doorway to nowhere. Shadows striped the lake, and the ducks had settled down for the evening among the weeds at the water’s edge. Uncle Jim had taken his truck away the night before. A short length of yellow police tape still flapped from one tree. Nathan took a jackknife out of his jeans pocket and cut it off, then crumpled the tape up and stuffed it into my tote bag.
As I walked up to the marble pillars, I dropped the Shield Persona. I sent my mind out in Search Mode: Chaos again and mounted the steps to stand between them. This time I felt an odd twinge of energy, not a field, more like a stray wisp. I grabbed it—mentally, of course—and twisted it into a loop. I was hoping to track down DD. Instead I found myself thinking of Michael. I switched the Search Mode over to Personnel.
Michael! I sent the thought into the loop. Mike, can you hear me?
I felt a twitch of recognition, nothing so definite as an answer, but a twitch, as if Michael, wherever he was, had suddenly thought of me and wondered why.
“Mike’s alive, all right,” I said. “I thought so. We O’Gradys can usually tell when one of us leaves for good.”
Nathan had been watching me with his head cocked a little to one side. “When Pat was shot,” he said, “did you—”
“Yeah.” I remembered the frantic couple of hours I’d spent, calling around the family, desperate for news. “I was in Mexico at the time, but I knew. I finally got hold of Kathleen, and she confirmed.”
“I see. Mexico?”
“None of your business. But anyway, I’d know if Michael were dead.”
“You’re certain of that?”
“As certain as I can be. What worries me is how long he’ll stay alive. I don’t know where in hell he is.”
“Let’s hope it’s not hell.”
I managed to laugh. “Yeah, let’s hope.”
I spent another ten minutes or so on the steps, trying to renew the contact with Michael. Nothing. As the loop I’d made out of the energy trace slowly dissipated, I received the impression that Michael had moved beyond my range. The portal and Michael’s disappearance baffled me so badly that I realized I’d better consult with Y.
“Nathan?” I said. “I need to go into trance.”
“Very well, but do it in the car. I won’t drive off till you’re done.”
He slid in behind the wheel while I settled myself in the backseat. Since in D.C. office hours were long over, I used our emergency frequency to send out a trance message to Y. In a few minutes he responded. His blond movie-star image popped into visibility beside me in the backseat.
“What’s all this?” he said.
<
br /> “I’ve got a major Chaos breach on my hands here,” I said. “And my brother Michael’s been caught up in it.”
The blond eyebrows over the perfect blue eyes shot up in surprise. When I finished telling him about my brother’s disappearance through the portal, he thought about my recital for so long that I began to have trouble holding the trance state.
“I do have an idea,” he said at last. “From what I know about your family, your brother’s bound to have some sort of wild talent. Have you considered parallel worlds? What you describe could be a gate of some sort. Michael may have the ability to sense gates and lock into their energies.”
“I know about parallel world theory, sure, but a gate? Are those real?”
“Theoretically, thus possibly so. Our database is inconclusive on that point. Unreliable, even.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
“Now, I’ll admit that Michael being a world-walker sounds far-fetched, but it does fit what few facts you have about this thing in the park. Look, I’ll consult with a couple of our people and get back to you on that.”
“A world-walker? There’s a name for it?”
“Oh, yes. They show up every now and then, or I should say, they claim to.”
“Suppose that he is in a parallel or deviant level of the multiverse. Do you think he’ll ever find his way back?”
“I really don’t know. I need to research the whole subject.”
“Okay. I’m worried sick.”
“I assumed that. I’ll treat this as a top priority fact search.”
Y disappeared without another thought.
I woke myself up, stretched, and got out of the backseat. I was yawning as I slid back into the front seat next to Nathan.
“I’m tired, I guess,” I said.
“You haven’t had a proper meal all day. We’re going out to dinner.”
We went to the pizzeria near the apartment, where I could get a salad while he ate the heavy stuff. Thanks to the Shield Persona, I began to feel drunk. My normal senses, the standard issue five, worked perfectly well. The others had dulled down and almost vanished, leaving me feeling half-alive, confused, wobbly, all the things that alcohol in excess does to you.
We returned to the apartment just as the night was rolling in with the fog. Before I opened the front door, I dropped the SP and went into Search Mode to scan the apartment—as safe as I’d left it. I raised the SP again immediately. Nathan insisted on going in first. I followed him and stood by my computer desk while he looked around. Streetlights and shop lights cast odd patches of glare and shadow across the furniture and the floor.
“We left the drapes open,” he said. “I’ll just close them.”
I started to make some trivial remark. Nathan lunged, grabbed me, and dragged me to the floor just as the bay window shattered. Glass sprayed. The bullet slammed into the opposite wall. Another followed through the break in the window. I could hear screaming from the street outside, a staccato of shots, and the crash of more breaking glass. A car alarm began honking in a hysterical sob. Nathan rolled away from me, slithered across the floor and around to the side of the couch, then stood up, gun in hand, and peered out the side window.
“Stay down,” he said. “I think he’s gone, but that sodding sign keeps blinking, and it’s hard to see the roof behind it.”
“Is that where he was?” I found it hard to speak.
“Only place he could have been.”
A pair of sirens, coming from opposite directions, cut through the yelling and the honking car horns on the street. Footsteps pounded up the stairs outside my apartment. Someone hammered on the door. “Police! Open up!”
“Yes, officer!” Nathan called out. “I’m on my way.”
As he strode across the room, he put the gun back into the shoulder holster, then zipped up his jacket. I decided that greeting the cops while lying sprawled on the carpet was too déclassé for words and sat up, but I made sure that the bulk of the couch stayed between me and the window. Nathan opened the door first a bare crack, then wide enough for a uniformed officer to push his way in.
“Lady, get back!” The cop shouted at Mrs. Zukovski, who was dithering behind him in a floor-length flowered bathrobe, then looked at Nathan. “Is everyone all right in here?”
“Yes,” Nathan said. “Fortunately, we were rolling around on the floor at the time.”
If he hadn’t just saved my life, I would have thrown something at him, preferably something sharp and heavy. The cop sputtered, then arranged a straight face. Nathan switched on the overhead light. Mrs. Zukovski dithered herself through the door. A hairnet covered her purple hair.
“Oh, my gawd!” She stared at the broken window. “Look at all that glass! It’s going to cost me a bundle to fix that bay.”
“Lady,” the cop said, “your tenant could have been killed. This sniper is a real nutcase. It’s just a damned good thing her boyfriend was here, or you’d have a real mess to clean up.”
Mrs. Z pulled a crumpled tissue from a bathrobe pocket and snuffled into it.
“I heard more shots,” Nathan said.
“That was him,” the cop said, “taking potshots at a couple of pedestrians, but he missed them, thank God for that.”
“Good.” Nathan reached inside his jacket and took out his Interpol ID. The cop’s eyes widened. For a moment he looked like a small boy meeting a famous football player.
“Thanks, Inspector,” he said. “I remember hearing about you. You’re here on official business, aren’t you?”
“Yes, related to the Romero murder.”
“I’ve called in a SWAT team. I need to get a forensics team up here to dig those bullets out of the wall.”
“Very good. Carry on.”
The cop pulled out a cell phone to call for his backup personnel. Nathan unzipped his jacket and stowed the ID. When she caught sight of the shoulder holster, Mrs. Z came out with another, “Oh, my gawd!”
“It’s all right,” I said. “He’s a police officer, too.”
“Oh, oh, well, I suppose, oh ...” She let the last “oh” turn into a sigh. “I’ll have to call George. I don’t know where he’s going to get some plywood or something this time of night.”
George was the minimally skilled handyman she hired for odd jobs.
“Well, I can’t use the apartment with no window,” I said.
“Oh, oh well, I suppose not, oh ...”
I let it drop. I had worse things to worry about than street noise and cold drafts. I could hear bullhorns outside as the SWAT team cleared the street. Sirens came and went. I found myself remembering Uncle Jim’s complaint about all the waiting involved in disasters. Finally, after about ten minutes, more police came pounding up the stairs to join us.
The forensics people took photographs of the wall and the window, close-ups of the bullets in the wall, and then of the bullets once they dug them out, leaving a pile of plaster and paint chips on the floor. Mrs. Z collapsed onto a kitchen chair and sniveled into her tissue while she watched that part of the operation. I figured that she was doing a cost analysis on the repair.
The forensics expert, wearing plastic gloves, showed the bullets to Nathan before he sealed them into a manila paper envelope.
“They appear to match the others,” Nathan said. “The two murders in Israel, that is, but I can’t be sure without putting them under the microscope.”
“Any idea of what kind of gun?” Forensics said.
“Yes, as far as we could tell, he was using a Dragunov SVD.”
Forensics blinked at him.
“It was originally a Soviet sniper’s rifle,” Nathan went on. “They show up all over the Middle East thanks to Soviet arms sales, but the Iranian DIO still manufactures them.”
“No shit?” Forensics turned to an assistant, who had a pad of paper and a pen. “You writing this down?”
“Of course,” she said. “What’s the DIO?”
“Domestic Industries Organization,?
?? Nathan said. “Do you want the name in Farsi?”
“No, no, I don’t know how to spell those Arabic names.”
Nathan winced. “Farsi isn’t Arabic. It’s not even related to Arabic. Never make that mistake if you ever go to the Middle East. That kind of ignorance is what marks an American as a possible victim.”
The forensics tech cringed, but she kept writing.
While Forensics worked, the original cop on the scene interviewed all three of us, though all he really wanted from Mrs. Z was the time when she heard the glass break. Since she could remember the commercial she’d been viewing at that moment, he could confirm the time later with the TV station. During Nathan’s part of the interview he admitted that we hadn’t been rolling around on the floor, which seemed to relieve Mrs. Z’s feelings to some extent.
“I was looking out the window at the moment,” Nathan said. “I saw movement on the roof, and then what appeared to be someone lifting a rifle, and I reacted. Knocked her out of the way. Army training, you know. We have to worry about snipers and the like back home.”
The cop nodded.
“I’m glad it didn’t turn out to be someone on the roof with a broom.” Nathan looked my way. “I hope you’re not bruised.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Not a problem.”
The SWAT team called in at that point. Johnson had gotten clean away. He was good at what he did.
When the police team left, Mrs. Zukovski followed, mumbling down the stairs behind them. I shut the door and switched off the overhead glare. The blinking purple light from the restaurant sign filled the room and glittered on the broken glass lying all over the couch.
“Is it going to be safe to stay here tonight?” I said.
“Of course not,” Nathan snapped. “Nola, he knows where you live. Think!”
“I’m trying. For some reason I feel oddly scattered.”
“Go pack a suitcase. We’re leaving.”
“Where are we going to go?”
“I’m not going to tell you.” He smiled in a tight-lipped kind of way. “If I tell you, Johnson might pull the information out of the air or your mind or whatever that is.”