Chapter 11 #2
Her hand tightened on his arm. “Too dangerous. I’ll do it.”
“No. This is no neighborhood for a woman to be walking around at night.”
She sighed. “Okay.”
When he climbed out of bed, she looked at his leg and his stomach.
He followed her gaze.
“How do those burns feel?”
“Not great. But I’ll live.” His gaze bore into her. “Thanks to you.”
She could only nod as she watched him pull on his pants. He had no shirt, but he walked into the shop and found one on a rack. When he returned, he asked, “You still have the gun we got here earlier?”
“Yes.”
That made her remember what had happened at the warehouse.
“You threw down the gun you had.”
“Yeah. It turned burning hot.” He zipped his jeans and told her, “Lock the door and keep the weapon with you until I come back.”
As soon as he had left, she got out of bed and pulled her clothing on. Then she took the revolver out of her purse and made a quick trip across the hall to the bathroom before returning and locking the door.
As she sat on the bed, she sent her mind toward Jake, trying to contact him. She couldn’t reach him, but it wasn’t like when he’d been leaving his body. She knew he was still on earth, and that knowledge was reassuring.
Then she sensed the edge of his thoughts and focused in on them. Her heart beat faster as she felt him coming toward her.
Finally he spoke.
Unlock the door.
She got up and let him in. As soon as he’d set bags and a pasteboard tray with cups down on the table, she hugged him.
“I didn’t like letting you out of my sight. Or out of my hearing.”
“Me neither.”
They pulled out seats at the table. He’d brought poor boys and cups of strong New Orleans coffee. With cream and sugar for her.
Did you find out about the warehouse?
He answered as he took a bite of the sandwich. The fire department saved the building, but the floats are destroyed.
Sorry!
I’ll pay for them.
She started to say it wasn’t his fault, but he shook his head. I burned the place up.
To save our lives.
They ate in silence for a few minutes before she said, So how did Mickey and his girlfriend find us?
He took a sip of coffee as he said, Convenient that you can talk and eat at the same time.
When she laughed, he went on. The Evelyn Morgan murder made the news. That would be a clue. Maybe they headed down here and then got more . . . um. . . vibes when they got to the city. Who knows what they can do.
She nodded. “And who knows what we can do, if we keep working at it. They may have done us a favor—showing us real power.”
He grinned, then sobered. We have to assume Evelyn Morgan knew about the clinic.
Or suspected. And thought it had affected us. Maybe she didn’t know how. And what about Eric Smithson, the guy who killed her then tried to tie me up in my shop?
I’m assuming that he doesn’t know. And he’s trying to find out.
She thought about that as she ate. Why does he care?
I’d like to know. I assume it’s not because he’s worried about liability from the old experiments.
He could be like Mickey and Minnie.
Minnie! I’m sure she’d hate being called that. But back to Smithson. I don’t think he’s got any psychic abilities. He’s using conventional methods. And he was shocked by the window image I put into his head.
Right.
And we can’t go to the cops about him. Or about Mickey and Minnie.
When they’d finished the meal, Jake said, ”We should get out of here.”
“Where are we going this time?”
“First, to practice our thunderbolt skills.”
“You mean like what the Odd Couple did to you.”
“Odd Couple! Like us.”
“But we’re not as odd yet,” she pointed out.
“Yeah. I shot a bolt back at them, but it hardly had any power. I didn’t even know we could do that.”
“How do we get more power?”
“Like I said, practice.”
“On what?”
“We can go out into the swamp and try to zap some trees.” He started for the door, then stopped. “Where’s the car?”
“Kendall said it was in a garage a few doors down.”
When Rachel started to straighten up the bed, Jake helped her. Together they folded the quilt and stuffed the trash into the bag from the fast-food restaurant.
Jake turned to inspect the room. “It looks like nobody was even here.”
“Maybe we should wipe away our fingerprints.”
“Yeah. Not a bad idea.”
They used paper towels from the bathroom to wipe all the hard surfaces they might have touched, then exited the shop through the back.
The car was where Kendall had left it.
When they had pulled into the alley, Jake asked, “You have some idea where to find the clinic?”
“South . . . and west.”
“How do you know?”
She reached into her purse and closed her fingers around the deck of Tarot cards, letting impressions come to her the way they did during a reading. “I have a feeling we’ll be headed in the right direction. And when we get closer, I may have a better idea.”
You’re the psychic.
You seem to have developed some talents we can use.
As they drove out of town, Rachel said, “We were pretty busy when we had our meeting with Mickey and Minnie, but we should see what we can figure out about them.”
“Like what?”
“Well, they looked like they were about our age.”
“Right. And they both had southern accents, but not too pronounced. Maybe they were born around here and moved away.”
She thought for a moment. “They found each other a while ago and worked on their talent–unless they just plain have more ability than we do.”
“I think it’s the former.”
“We hope.”
Jake swung his gaze toward her, then back to the road. “You think we’re going to meet them again?”
She felt a shiver go over her skin. “I wish it weren’t true, but I do think we will.”
“You think they got out of the warehouse?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s one advantage we’ve got over them–you. I doubt that either of them is a Tarot card reader.”
She murmured her assent. When she’d gotten interested in the field, she hadn’t thought that it might save her own life.
Jake squeezed her hand, and she knew he’d picked up the thought.
“Anything else we know about them?” he asked.
“They don’t have to touch to generate strong thunderbolts.”
“That goes to the assumption that they’ve been practicing for a while.”
The conversation petered out, and they sat in silence until Jake pointed to a secondary road.
“What about we go there for target practice?”
“As good a place as any.”
They turned off the highway onto a narrow road barely wide enough for two cars to pass. But there was no traffic coming toward them.
The road soon went from blacktop to gravel.
Trees thick with Spanish moss crowded in on either side.
She looked out the window trying to spot any houses that might be in the area, but she saw only swamp vegetation and pools of water covered with duckweed.
An alligator plopped into the water as they passed.
Jake found a patch of relatively dry ground, and they both got out, crunching over gravel, then stopping to stare around them at the peaceful scene. It was damp and dark under the trees and probably ten degrees cooler than in the city.
“If we attack the trees, we’re going to scare the birds,” Rachel said, looking over at some egrets wading in the shallow water of a bayou and standing on the far shore.
“Let’s hope we can.”
“What did you do when you sent that mental thunderbolt toward Mickey and Minnie?”
“I’m not sure. We were under attack. After I saw them do it, I just thought of calling up energy, then sending it in a stream toward them.”
“Okay. Let’s try it.”
They walked a little way from the car and stood shoulder to shoulder, their hands clasped.
You direct it, Rachel said, since she had no idea what he had done at the warehouse.
He pointed toward a tree about twenty feet away. I’ll see if I can hit the trunk.
She watched Jake focus on the trunk, felt his body tense as he gathered his concentration.
She wasn’t sure what he was doing, but she knew he was trying to recreate his actions in the battle.
Her heart started to pound as he stood for long seconds with his fingers clamping hers in a death grip.
When nothing happened, he made a disgusted sound.
“Maybe they blasted it out of me.” The observation was followed by a curse. “Nothing’s there. If they come back and attack us, what are we going to do, crawl under the table?”