Binding the Shadows (Arcadia Bell) (14 page)

“Are you certain it was Priya and not some sort of demonic trickery?”

“Pretty positive.”

“I wish I could’ve been there to hear his emotions.”

“Maybe you can meet him when he reports back.”

Lon didn’t comment.

•  •  •

Noel Saint-Hill’s address was a half hour drive from Kar Yee’s place. The neighborhood was Richie Rich. Brand-new McMansions were squeezed into tiny plots of land between older homes. I hated when people did that—bought a house for the location and tore it down to build something that didn’t fit the neighborhood. What kind of person needs six bedrooms, a home gym, and a three-car garage? Apparently the Saint-Hills, as their four-story home was one of the new ones.

And it was surround by two police cars and an ambulance.

A crowd of onlookers was gathered on the front lawn of the neighboring house, and when Lon slowed the car, I saw why.

A sky-blue restored vintage car with a Road Runner logo on the trunk and a dragon sticker on the bumper was sitting askew across the shallow driveway. A bloody body lay on the cement beneath it, crushed under its rear left wheel.

Lon parked farther down the street, away from the cop cars. We trotted over to the crowd as a police tow truck was pulling up. Two officers were talking to the driver, and another officer was holding the crowd back. Lon pushed his way to the front of the crowd, tugging me along. And from where we stood, we got a pretty good view—or bad, considering.

The body was quite literally crushed. The wheel sat on what was once a chest. Bone and flesh spread out beneath it, looking like something that should be in a butcher’s shop. Bright red blood pooled around the carnage, seeping into the driveway. My stomach lurched. Then I spotted the lock of blond hair. I craned my neck to peer around the wheel.

It was Noel Saint-Hill.

I grabbed Lon’s jacket sleeve.

“What happened?” Lon asked a middle-aged man nearby. Another Earthbound.

He hesitated for a moment, looking at Lon’s gilded halo, while a woman who could’ve been his wife spoke up. “It wasn’t an accident. People are saying that it was a hit and run, but they’re wrong. I saw the car lift off the ground. Saw it through my living room window.”

“Brenda,” the man said warningly. “It’s none of our business.”

“Look at the grass,” she said, ignoring him. “No tire tracks. If someone drove the car up on the lawn like that and hit him, there’d be tire marks. That car was dropped on top of him.”

The cop handling the crowd was calling for witnesses and telling everyone else to go home. Brenda’s husband dragged her away, telling her to stay out of things. I wanted to talk to her, to ask her more about what she saw, but her husband was quick and the crowd was shifting.

Lon pulled me aside to the edge of the throng and spoke in a low, agitated voice near my ear. “You know damn well what happened, don’t you? Remember the safe in Diablo Market?”

I did. Nearly lifted through the counter by the other robber, the telekinetic kid who floated Tambuku’s register through the air. “A safe is a hell of a lot smaller than a car.”

“Maybe his knack got a little stronger.”

“Shit. You think that Brenda woman saw the telekinetic kid do it?”

Lon swiped a thumb over one side of his mustache. “Don’t know, but Brenda is an Earthbound.” He glanced over his shoulder. “The police aren’t. And based on what I heard of her husband’s feelings, he’s worried the cops might overhear his busybody wife telling a ‘crazy,’ unexplainable story about a boy lifting a car with his knack.”

And if the boy was deranged enough to kill his own friend, what else was he capable of?

“We need to talk to her . . . without her husband,” I said.

Lon nodded. We marched around the crowd. Lon’s healthy six-foot frame gave him a better view. After a few seconds of shuffling, he spotted them striding across the street. We trailed them, hoofing it to catch up. “You distract him,” I told Lon, then shouted the woman’s name. They both turned around. “Can I ask you one more thing?”

Her face lifted, as if she was more than happy to talk, then her husband said something I couldn’t hear. Whatever it was, it annoyed her. Lon stepped up immediately, asking the man for directions to the civic center. As soon as the husband began spouting off streets and pointing, I pulled Brenda aside.

“I know this sounds weird, but I think I’ve seen a kid who has a knack strong enough to lift that car,” I said conspiratorially. “He was buddies with Noel. Dark hair—”

“Telly,” she confirmed, nodding her head quickly. “I don’t know his real name, but that’s what Noel called him.” Telly was a common nickname for Earthbounds with telekinetic knacks. I heard it around the bar all the time. “That boy’s been hanging around here a lot over the past few months, showing off, lifting things in the driveway where anyone could see him. Humans live on this block, too,” she complained. Yep, biggest gripe that older Earthbounds had against the younger generation, just like Andrew, the owner of Diablo Market. Don’t show off your knack around humans: it only leads to trouble.

“Did you see him lift the car?” I asked.

“No. It all happened so fast. I saw it in the air, then the crash shook the floor in my house. But I thought I saw someone running. I wouldn’t put it past Telly do something like this. That kid is bad news.” She leaned closer and spoke in a lower voice. “A couple of months ago, someone broke into Noel’s school and stole computers, money from the cafeteria registers. Wrecked the principal’s office and the teacher’s lounge. Did over a hundred thousand dollars in damage.”

Jesus. I remembered hearing about that in the news. “They never arrested anyone, but someone hacked into the school’s security system. Deleted school files.”

“That had to be Telly. Noel’s bragged about Telly’s computer hacking skills. Noel’s mother grounded him a few weeks ago for stealing credit card numbers and using them to buy things online. Noel said it was Telly’s idea. At least, that’s the rumor around the neighborhood.”

“Any idea how his knack is able to do something like that?” I said, nodding to the gruesome scene across the street. “I’ve never known a telekenetic to be able to lift that much weight.”

She shook her head. “No telling with that kid.”

“Do you know where he lives?”

“He doesn’t live in town,” she said. “He’s from the suburbs, or somewhere on the coast. La Sirena, maybe.”

Damn. Finding a telekenetic teenage Earthbound in La Sirena . . . well, needle in haystack, and all that. But maybe Brenda saw the disappointment in my face, because she quickly added, “Wherever he lives, he spends a lot of time hanging out under the railroad bridge at the end of Monterrey Street with some other delinquents. I called the cops on them once to chase them out, but they all came back after a few days.”

“Brenda!” Her husband was Mr. Frowny Face again. If Lon shushed me like that all the time, I’d have to tell him where to stick it. Thank God for Lon’s quiet, laid-back ways and his ability to keep the husband occupied long enough for me to get what I needed.

Turning back to Brenda, I mouthed a thank-you right before her testy husband escorted her away. Monterrey Street. Didn’t know where that was, but GPS could find it. I started to tell Lon all about my discovery and suggest we try our luck hunting Telly when a car pulled up, brakes squealing. A blonde Earthbound jumped out. Police tried to stop her from running onto the crime scene.

“This is my house!” she yelled. And when she pushed the officer out of the way and saw the Road Runner, she made a horrible keening wail.

Lon grabbed my arm and tugged me from the chaos. “I can’t be here,” he said sharply as he marched me back to his parked car. It took me a few moments to realize from the pained look on his face that he was trying to disengage his knack. Sometimes when he’s steamrolled with a lot of strong emotions coming from too many people at once, he gets overwhelmed and has trouble tuning it all out. I could only imagine what he could hear right now—the confusion and anxiety of the crowd, the amped up intensity of the police, the mother’s grief. . . .

When we got back inside the SUV, he seemed to have put enough distance between his knack and the scene. “You okay?” I asked.

He shook his head and didn’t say anything more about it. Just started the engine and drove away.

Monterrey Street was a few blocks away, where the rich neighborhood petered off into middle-class, then suddenly connected to one of those sketchy, vaguely ominous pockets of the city that had been neglected for years. Lon slowed the SUV as I peered out my window, eyes following the old, disused railroad tracks that crept along the bridge in the distance. Couldn’t see much from here. It spanned what was once Monterrey Creek, according to GPS, but now looked like nothing more than a weed-infested ditch.

Lon stopped the car a half-block away. “I’m parking here,” he explained. “If this kid can lift cars, I don’t think I want to give him any weapons.”

I glanced around, doing my best to push down rising anxiety, wondering how much time we had before someone busted one of Lon’s windows to perform a little hot-wire surgery.

He patted the dash in answer to my worries. “Fort Knox.”

“What about Telly? What if he’s hanging out with some other Earthbounds who have amped-up knacks? We could be walking into a hornet’s nest.”

“Good thing you’ve got an early detection system.” Yeah, I did feel safer knowing he could sense sudden changes in emotion. He reached across my lap and stuck his hand between my knees.

“Hey!” I said, but it came out a little too hopeful to be a proper protest.

“You wish. Move.” His hand dove beneath my seat and surfaced with the sawed-off vintage Lupara.

“I distinctly remember telling you not to bring that thing,” I complained.

“Felt like you were daring me.” The thin lines around the outer corners of his squinty eyes tightened as his mouth quivered.

“Better than your full-sized shotgun, I suppose. At least you can hide this one.”

“You’re welcome. Come on.”

We trekked down a sidewalk webbed with cracks, my jeans brushing brittle, dead grass. The bridge running parallel had seen better days. Its concrete was marred and crumbling, girders rusted. The underbelly arching over the dry creek bed was hidden in shadow. If someone was down there, we couldn’t see them . . . but they couldn’t see us, either.

Lon stopped me where the sidewalk ended and the dusty slopes of the creek bed began. After a few moments, he glanced around and removed the Lupara from the inside of his jacket. He held up two fingers and nodded toward the shadow under the bridge. Okay, two against two. Hopefully it wasn’t two gigantic lunkheads with Merrimoth’s amped-up temperature knack. But as we took quiet, careful steps down the steep grade, following a well-worn path through dry grass, we didn’t see muscle-bound fire-breathers, or monsterific trolls waiting to collect a toll. Just three tattered camping tents lining the creek bed, a few lawn chairs, and two boys, shooting the shit and laughing.

One was dark-headed, but his back was facing us. The other was maybe sixteen, seventeen. Hard to tell. I could only see his profile. But he was husky and animated and begging the dark-haired one for something.

“Come on, let me just see it.”

The thought crossed my mind that we were about to break up some seedy yet kinda hot street punk blowjob exchange. In that case, maybe we should, you know, just wait until it was over. No sense in ruining a good show. Lon looked askance at me. I shrugged. Guess I was the only filthy-minded person, because the boy wasn’t trying to get in the other guy’s pants, he was tugging on a bag.

“You can’t have any. Forget it.”

“One drop.”

“You got three hundred bucks buried under the tent? I don’t think so. But if you wanna be my wingman, you can earn it.”

While the boy hesitated, the other one, the boy in charge, shifted the bag out of reach. It could’ve been any old backpack. And it was hard to tell if his hair was merely short or if he had a buzz cut, but he
did
have a blue halo. I homed in on his voice as Lon and I crept closer.

“You want me to help you sell it?”

“My supplies are running lower than I’d like, so I need to replenish. I want you to help me get a little more cash.”

“I thought you took it. Why don’t you just steal some more?”

“There are only two places I can get this, and the person I ganked it from . . . I just can’t go back there. Besides, he only had a little more, and I’m not interested in small-time stuff. I want to go straight to the source this time, and this guy’s got major security. So I’m gonna need money for some new equipment to get around it. I’m talking James Bond shit—plasma cutters, C-4 plastic, hacking software. All that costs. So I want you to help me clean out a few safes and registers.”

“I thought you and Noel were done with that.”

Mother trucker.

“Noel was a pussy. You want to help me, or not?” He reached inside his backpack and retrieved something. After peeling off a cuff of bubble wrap, he held it up for the other kid’s inspection. It was a small, clear bottle with a cork stopper, filled with bright red liquid. It looked exactly like some of my medicinal jars.