“That’s a lie.”
“And I’m the one who identified those first investors for you, the venture capitalists who backed you when you decided to sell the casino and start building condo towers.”
Martin’s aura was an inferno now.
“I would have found the investors on my own,” he shouted.
“That’s not true. You’re a mid-range strategy talent, Martin. You can sense opportunities and put together a plan with a skill few can match because you’re psychic in that way. But you’re no good when it comes to reading people.”
“Shut your stupid mouth.”
“Without that talent, all the business insight in the world is useless. Building a financial empire isn’t just about numbers and the bottom line. It’s about identifying and exploiting your opponent’s strengths and weaknesses.”
He gave her a sharklike smile. “You think I need a lecture on the art of the deal from you?”
“For twelve years I’ve been your personal profiler. I’m the one who tells you when a business associate is in trouble, either financially or in his personal life. I warn you when someone is trying to con you. I identify the strengths and weaknesses of your opponents and your partners. I tell you exactly what you need to offer to someone in order to close the deal, and I’m the one who tells you when your best option is to walk away from the table.”
“You had your uses, I’ll grant you that. But I don’t need you anymore. Before we finish this, though, I’d really like to know how you tumbled on to my little arms-dealing sideline.”
“As far as your guests and business associates are concerned, I’m just a trusted member of the staff. No one looks twice at me. No one notices me. But I take a good look at them. That’s what you pay me to do, after all. Sometimes I see things and sometimes I hear things. And I am very, very good when it comes to research, remember?”
“How much do you know?”
“About the people you’re involved with?” She raised one shoulder slightly. “Not a lot. Just that it’s some sort of cartel run by very powerful sensitives and that they’ve seduced you into doing their dirty work.”
Martin’s aura flared higher. “No one has seduced me.”
“Until recently I would never have believed that anyone could buy you,” she said. “I mean, what could a bunch of gangsters offer one of the most successful men on the planet that would make it worth his while to risk his freedom, his reputation and his life?”
Martin’s rage showed in his eyes now. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. The organization isn’t some mob.”
“Yes, it is, Martin. The first time you brought those two men to the Miami residence, I told you they were very, very dangerous.”
“So am I,” Martin hissed. He reached up and slowly removed his mirrored glasses. “More dangerous than you can imagine, thanks to my new business associates. And thanks to them, I no longer need you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The organization those two men represent is about much more than money. It’s all about power, real power; the kind that world leaders and warlords and billionaires can only dream about.”
Suddenly she understood. She had not thought that she could be any more appalled than she already was but she had been wrong.
“I guess this explains the changes in your aura in the past couple of months,” she said.
Martin looked startled.
“What changes?” he demanded.
“I thought perhaps you had become the victim of some kind of mental illness that affected your parasenses.”
“I am not sick, damn you.”
“Yes, you are, but not because of some natural disease process. You did this to yourself. With a little help from your new friends, of course.”
Martin took a step closer. He didn’t look horrified. He looked eager. Excited. “You can see the effects of the drug in my aura?”
“A drug,” she repeated. “Yes, that’s the only logical explanation. Those two men supplied you with some sort of drug that affects your parasenses.”
“There’s an excellent likelihood that it will also increase my natural life span, maybe by as much as a couple of decades. What’s more, they’ll be good decades. I won’t be weak and frail. I’ll maintain my powers.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this. Martin, you’re a brilliant business-man. Don’t you know when you’ve been sold a bill of goods? The promise of longevity is the oldest scam in the world.”
“The reason the researchers aren’t certain about the extended life span is because the new drug hasn’t been around long enough to test the theory. Those at the top have been using the stuff for only a few years. But the lab data look very promising.”
“You’re a fool, Martin.”
“It’s true,” he insisted. “Even if they’re wrong about the drug’s ability to lengthen my life, that doesn’t alter the fact that the formula works. It can kick a level-seven strategy talent like me all the way up to a nine or a ten.”
“You’re not a nine or a ten. I’d know. Something has changed in your aura, though. Whatever it is, it isn’t—” She broke off, groping for the right word. “It isn’t wholesome.”
“Wholesome?” He laughed. “Now there’s a silly, old-fashioned word. Do you think I care how wholesome I am? For your information, you’re right, though. The drug they gave me didn’t elevate the level of my talent. It wasn’t intended to have that effect.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The drug can be genetically altered in a variety of ways to suit an individual’s psychic profile. The version I’m taking has provided me with an entirely new talent.”
“If you believe that, you really have gone off the deep end.”
“I am not insane,” Martin shouted.
The words seemed to echo around them. A few seconds of terrifying stillness followed. Then Martin’s aura flared with a sickening heat.
She knew, then, that the moment had come. He was going to try to kill her now. The only question was whether he intended to use a gun or his bare hands. One thing was certain, standing there at the end of the dock left her nowhere to run.
The mind-searing blast of energy came out of nowhere. It roared over her, bringing disorienting pain and the promise of an endless plunge into the abyss.
Not a gun. She fell to her knees under the force of the lightning that slashed at her senses. Not his bare hands, either. A slight miscalculation on her part.
Martin stared down at her, enthralled with his own power.
“They were right,” he breathed. “They told me the truth about the drug. Congratulations. You are about to become the first person to witness what I can do with my new talent.”
“Don’t touch me.”
“I’m not going to touch you. It isn’t necessary. I’m going to incinerate your psychic senses. You will go into a coma and then you will die.”
“Martin, no, don’t do this.” Her voice was steadier now. So were her senses. She had recovered somewhat from the initial traumatizing shock. She was getting a handle on the pain, which meant that she was pushing back the invading waves of energy. “Maybe it’s not too late. Maybe some of the experts in the Society can help you.”
“You’re pleading with me. I like that.”
“I’m not going to beg for my life. But there is one thing you should know before you do this.”
“What?”
“If you hadn’t come along, I would have owned that florist shop by now, a whole chain of flower shops.”
“That was always your greatest flaw,” Martin said. “Your dreams and ambitions were so much smaller than mine.”
He heightened the psychic heat of the dark energy he was generating, his face tightening with effort. She pushed back harder, pulling energy from her own aura. The pain lessened some more.
“Die, damn you,” he hissed. He took another step closer. “Why don’t you die?”
Her strength
was coming back. She was able to focus clearly on maintaining the energy shield that her aura had become.
Martin staggered but he did not seem to notice that she was fighting him. Instead, he appeared disoriented.
Angrily, he pulled himself together and took another step toward her, almost touching her. He forced more energy through the murky bands of dark lightning he was generating.
“You’re supposed to die,” he shouted.
He reached down to seize her by the throat. She raised her arms in a reflexive, defensive gesture. He grabbed her hands. She gripped his wrists.
Her palms burned. The world exploded, sending jolt after jolt of shock waves through her senses.
Martin Crocker convulsed once. He looked at her with the eyes of a man who is peering into hell.
“No,” he screamed.
He reeled, lost his balance and went over the side of the dock into the water. His aura winked out with terrifying suddenness.
She rose, heart pounding. For the second time in her life, she had killed a man. Not just any man this time—a very powerful, influential multibillionaire who just happened to be involved in a dangerous criminal enterprise.
And her hands still burned.
ONE
WAIKIKI . . .
The big man in the short-sleeved, orange and purple flowered shirt was going to be a problem in about five minutes. It didn’t take a psychic to sense the angry, volatile energy stirring the atmosphere around table five. Any experienced bartender would have picked up on it. For a bartender who just happened to be psychic and who was also an ex-cop, the invisible warning signs had started blazing neon-bright when Mr. Orange and Purple Flowers walked into the Dark Rainbow half an hour earlier.
Luther Malone gave the mai tai a quick stir with a swizzle stick and set it on Julie’s tray next to the beer and the Blue Hawaii. Julie leaned over the bar to pluck a cherry and a slice of pineapple out of the chilled containers.
“Got trouble on five,” she said quietly. “The idiot is picking on Crazy Ray. Fortunately for the big fool, Ray hasn’t noticed yet.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Luther said.
Although the hole-in-the-wall establishment was located in Waikiki, they didn’t get much tourist trade. Tucked away in a small courtyard half a block off busy Kuhio Avenue, the Rainbow catered to an eccentric group of regulars. Some of the customers, Crazy Ray among them, were more eccentric than others. Ray had long ago dedicated himself to the gods of surfing. When Ray was not surfing, he went into a Zen-like state. Everyone who knew him acknowledged that he was best left in that otherworldly zone.
“Be careful,” Julie said. She garnished the mai tai with the pineapple and the cherry. “A lot of that bulk is muscle, not fat.”
“Yeah, I can see that. I appreciate the tip.”
Julie flashed him a quick smile. “I’d really hate to have anything happen to you, boss. The hours on this job mesh perfectly with my work at the hotel.”
Like so many others employed in the tourist trade throughout Hawaii, Julie held down two jobs. Life in the islands had its benefits but it was expensive. Friday and Saturday nights she showed up at the Dark Rainbow to help with the dinner rush. Her regular day job was working the front desk at one of the countless small, faded, budget hotels that somehow managed to survive in the shadows of the big beachfront resorts and high-rise condos.
In addition to Julie two nights a week, the Rainbow usually employed a dishwasher. That position, however, was currently open. Again. Dishwashers came and went with such relentless frequency that the proprietors, Petra and Wayne Groves, no longer bothered to remember names. They called each one Bud and let it go at that. The most recent Bud had quit the previous night. Evidently the job had interfered with his regular appointments with his meth dealer.
The door to the kitchen swung open. Wayne Groves, half owner of the Rainbow, emerged with a tray of platters, each laden with mounds of deep-fried food. Pretty much everything that came out of the Dark Rainbow’s kitchen was fried.
Wayne came to an abrupt halt, his attention riveted on the man in the orange and purple shirt.
Wayne had a lean, rangy build and hard, sharp features that would have suited an old school gunslinger. His eyes went with the image. They were ice cold. He was sixty-five but could still read the last line on the chart at the eye doctor’s. The truth was he could have read a few more lines below that but they didn’t design eye tests for people with preternatural vision.
Wayne was covered from head to foot in tattoos, the most distinctive one being the red-eyed snake coiled around his gleaming bald scalp. The head of the snake was positioned high on his forehead, a dark jewel in an ominous crown.
Wayne was a very focused person. Most of the time the full force of his concentration was directed at taking orders for fish and chips and hamburgers or polishing glassware. But at the moment he was locked on another target. Flower Shirt didn’t know it but he was now squarely in the sights of a man who had once made his living working as a sniper for a clandestine government agency.
Luther grabbed the cane that was hooked over the counter. Time to get moving. The last thing they needed at the Rainbow was an incident that would result in a visit from the Honolulu PD. The neighboring business establishments would not appreciate it. Around here, everyone liked to keep a low profile. That went double for the Rainbow’s regulars, most of whom were badly damaged sensitives like Crazy Ray.
He maneuvered his way out from behind the bar. He paused briefly near the still and silent Wayne.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll handle it.”
Wayne blinked and snapped out of his lethal stillness.
“Whatever,” he growled. He turned and glided toward a nearby table.
The kitchen door opened again on a wave of grease-scented heat. Petra Groves, the chef and co-owner of the restaurant, appeared. She raked the room with an assessing expression while she wiped her hands on her badly stained apron.
“Had a feelin’,” she said. She hadn’t lived in Texas since childhood but the laid-back accent still clung to every word she spoke.
Petra’s intuition, like Wayne’s ability to take down a target with an impossibly long-range rifle shot, was well above normal. Actually, it could only be described as paranormal.
Both Wayne and Petra were mid-range sensitives; both had retired from the same no-name agency. Petra had been Wayne’s spotter in the days when Wayne had worked as a sniper. Together they had formed a lethal team. They had also become another kind of team—partners for life.
Petra was a sturdily built woman in her early sixties. She wore her long gray hair in a braid down her back. A badly yellowed chef ’s toque sat squarely atop her head. A gold ring glinted in one ear. While Wayne carried a concealed gun in an ankle holster, Petra favored a knife; a big one. She kept it in a sheath beneath her long apron.
“I’ve got it handled,” Luther said.
“Right.” Petra nodded once and stalked back into the hot kitchen.
Luther tapped his way across the tiled floor. The overall level of tension in the room was rising fast. The crowd was getting restless. The study of parapsychology had been thoroughly discredited by the modern scientific establishment. Because of that, a lot of folks went through their entire lives ignoring, suppressing or remaining willfully oblivious to the psychic side of their natures. But in situations like this, even those with normal sensitivity found themselves looking around for the nearest exit well before they had registered exactly what was wrong. The crowd at the Rainbow was anything but normal.
Flower Shirt didn’t seem to be aware of Luther or the restless energy of the regulars. He was too busy poking at Crazy Ray with a sharp, verbal stick.
“Hey, Surfer Bum,” he said loudly. “You make a good living screwing female tourists? How much do you charge the ladies for a peek at your little surfboard?”
Ray ignored him. He continued to sit hunched over his beer, munching steadily on his deep-fried
fish and fries. He had the broad-shouldered build and the burned-in tan of a man who spends his days riding the waves. His lanky brown hair had been bleached by the sun. Couldn’t blame Flower Shirt for picking the wrong target, Luther thought. Ray didn’t look crazy, not unless you could see his aura.
“What’s the matter?” Flower Shirt said. “Got a problem answering a simple question? Where’s that aloha spirit I’m always hearing so much about?”
Ray put down his beer and started to turn. Luther jacked up his senses until he could see the auras of those around him. Light and dark reversed but not in the way they did in a photographic negative. When he was running hot like this the colors he viewed were anything but black and white. The hues came from various points along the paranormal spectrum. There were no words to describe them. Energy pulsed and flared and spiked around every person in the vicinity.
The growing tension had been palpable to his normal senses, but perceived through his parasenses, it had already escalated into a flood tide of dangerously swirling currents.
The brief moment of vertigo that always accompanied the shift in perception evaporated between one step and the next. He was accustomed to the short flash of acute disorientation. He had been living with his talent since he had come into it in his early teens.
He concentrated on Ray first. Flower Shirt was the most obnoxious person within range but Ray was the most unpredictable. The seething, barely controlled craziness showed clearly in the murky hues and erratic pulses of his aura. The most alarming stuff took the shape of sickly, greenish-yellow filaments that flashed and disappeared in no discernible pattern. The tendrils gathered strength rapidly as Ray’s frail grasp on reality started to weaken. He slid rapidly into his uniquely paranoid universe.