Water To Burn Part 17

"Yeah, since I can't pick him up on a scan. A quick survey of the kind of places he might hang out in could turn him up. If we spot Reb Zeke, you can come at him from one direction, while I come up from behind. I'd hate to ensorcell someone who looks as frail as he does, but I may have to, if we can't physically pin him."

"That would work, yes. If I spot one of the men who were protecting him, I can call Sanchez. The police can pick him up, and they'll get the information out of him-"

"Yeah, sure!" I broke in. "The last piece of information we'll ever get, if the cops work the guy over or scare the bejeezus out of him. Look, I've got some ideas about this."

Eventually he agreed with them. I dressed for the job in my tightest jeans, a low-cut black blouse, a pair of beaten-up black boots with medium heels, and my older brother's cast-off khaki trail jacket as a nod to the damp weather. As I was leaving the bedroom, I had a sudden inspiration. I took the plastic bag that held the remains of Michael's stash and slipped it into an inside pocket. Ari wore his usual jeans, a gray sweater, and his leather bomber jacket.

"You look like one of the homeless yourself," Ari told me.

"That's the idea," I said. "I need to stop at a liquor store to buy a couple of packs of cigarettes. They're almost as good as cash on the street."

I did, however, also withdraw some of the Agency's money from the nearest automatic teller machine. If I'd been down and out and desperate, I'd have wanted payback for information, so I couldn't blame the people who actually were in that condition. When I got back into the car, Ari gave me a grim look.

"I don't like this," he said. "I don't think you should go through with it, not without me there."

"I've been waiting for you to say that. Can you think of anything better?"

"No, since you don't want the police involved."

"It may not come to anything, you know, or we could get lucky and spot Reb Zeke himself, in which case I won't have to playact at all."

"Let's hope, then. But if things look too dangerous, I'm not letting you out of the car."

"You'll let me out when I tell you to, or it could ruin everything."

He glared at me, then shrugged and started the car.

Because of the plan I had in mind, I had to let Ari drive. He did try to avoid killing us or wrecking the rental car, driving at about half his usual speed, stopping at stop lights, and refraining from swerving in front of buses and trucks. I only shrieked twice. Back and forth we went, first to the Panhandle, then downtown along Mission Street.

We cruised past the filthy sidewalks around Sixth and Mission, turned up Sixth and surveyed the human misery standing or sitting among the alleys and cheap hotels. We returned to Mission via Market and Seventh, where the traffic had Ari cursing in several languages at once. At Fifth, we turned up past the Old Mint, a dirty stone takeoff on a cla.s.sical temple. A couple of men were sleeping on the little lawn in front, but no one we recognized.

We finally hit paydirt on Market itself. The office workers had all gone inside to their jobs by then, and the store clerks had yet to arrive to open the fancy boutiques and department stores, so the broad street, gleaming with silver streetcar tracks, stretched out oddly empty. A few people wandered along the sidewalks; a few cars drove down the asphalt side lanes. We were traveling past the s.h.i.+ning clean windows of Bloomingdale's department store when I looked across the many lanes to the opposite side of Market. The unusually tall African-American guy was sitting on the sidewalk near the cavernous entrance to the Flood Building, a multi-story pile of gray stone. Ari drove on a little ways and let me off at Fourth Street.

"Go back to Fifth and Mission and park in the munic.i.p.al lot," I said. "I don't think things will get nasty, but you never know, and I want to know you've got my back."

"I'll be there if I have to leave the sodding car in the middle of the street."

In cold gray fog light I crossed Market and walked along the sidewalk under a row of plane trees that lifted bare branches to the damp sky. The tall guy was still sitting where I'd spotted him. He was wearing a pair of filthy slacks and a green parka that I recognized as old Army issue, dirty and faded. Darker spots marked the places where he'd once worn insignia, probably his unit number and service branch, that kind of thing. A dark patch on the sleeve formed the silhouette of a chevron of sergeant's stripes.

When I came up, he looked at me and quirked an eyebrow. His hair had gone gray at the temples, with a scatter of gray hair in the rest-First Gulf War vet, I figured. I leaned against the bra.s.s plaque on the Flood Building wall, right next to where he sat.

"Mind if I join you?" I said.

"Pretty girl like you?" He had a deep voice but pleasant. "h.e.l.l, no, I don't mind."

For a moment or two we stayed companionably silent, waiting for a pair of the well-dressed employed to go past, her wrapped in a pink wool coat, him in a fitted leather jacket and tweed slacks. They glanced at us and hurried on fast.

"Hey, Sarge," I said, "someone told me you know where the rabbi is."

"Yeah? They was wrong."

"I'm not a cop."

"Sure you're not." He laughed.

I slithered the rolled-up plastic bag of dope out of my jacket pocket, holding it tight against the cloth to keep it hidden. Once I held it securely, I casually relaxed my arm till the bag hung in his line of sight. He whistled under his breath and s.n.a.t.c.hed it to stow it inside his own jacket.

"Okay," he said, "so you're not a cop. My mistake, sorry'bout that. Why do you want to find the rabbi?"

"I heard he has something to give me." I handed him, openly this time, a pack of cigarettes and a folder of matches.

"Thanks," he said. "Let me light one of these, and we'll talk. You want one?"

"No, I don't smoke."

"Smart girl. Wish I didn't."

I squatted down next to him on the upwind side. My jeans groaned but, thank heavens, didn't split. He lit the cigarette and took a couple of long drags. "Okay," he said, "what's your name?"

"Nola." I decided against adding my last name.

Sarge grinned, exposing a couple of gaps between yellow teeth. "Okay, you're right about that. He's got a letter for you. I don't know who it's from. He just keeps talking about giving a letter to some chick named Nola O'Grady."

"That's me, all right. How are we going to get together? I don't have an address I can give you. My man won't like it if I do, y'know?"

Sarge nodded, took another drag on the cigarette, and considered the problem. "Not sure," he said at last. "I don't know where the rabbi is. Honest, I don't. He freaked because a cop came up to him and knew his name. That was yesterday. He's disappeared somewhere, but y'know he can't have gone far. I mean, he's got no money."

"Yeah, that usually keeps you close to home. He's sure got a thing about flying saucers, doesn't he?"

"Jeez. You get sick of hearing it sometimes."

"Do you know why he's so afraid of cops?"

"Ain't we all?" Sarge paused for a bellow of laughter. "But the rabbi, he swears up and down he got sent up for something he didn't do. He ain't going back inside, he tells me, not for nothing. Eighteen years, he told me, in slam."

"Where? Do you know?"

"Somewhere in Israel, or that's his story. How did you get all the way over here, then? I ask him. He never would say, just kept shaking his head. Weird. But it was the flying saucer people who put him away, he tells me, so who knows where it was?"

"Uh, right, or if it happened at all." Dimly I could see that everything I knew about Reb Zeke was hovering on the edge of making sense, albeit a very weird kind of sense, but I'd need more information before I could push it over that edge. "That's too bad, either way."

"Yeah. I'll tell him about you when I see him again. He's bound to show up somewhere, one of the places that feed us, a shelter or something. I'll tell him I saw you, and that you're looking for him so you can get that letter." He paused to gaze across Market Street toward Bloomingdale's. "Most dry days I hang out around here, if the cops don't roust me. The tourists, some of them part with a few bucks. You could come back here and find me, and maybe I'll have news."

"Good idea." I stood up, then took a twenty from my jeans pocket and held it out. "Thanks for the help."

Sarge grinned and took the bill, which disappeared so fast, with just the bare flick of his wrist and a shake, that I couldn't see where in his clothes he'd hidden it.

"Nice trick," I said.

"You don't want people seeing when you get something worth stealing." He laughed again. "I got plenty of free time to practice."

"There'll be another one of those if you find the rabbi for me."

"Cool." Again the gap-toothed grin. "I'll keep an eye out."

By then a sporadic trickle of pedestrians flowed along the sidewalk, and out in the street traffic was picking up. I glanced around and saw Ari on the other side of Market, waiting for the light to change at the crosswalk in front of Bloomingdale's. I realized a little late that Sarge might remember him from their encounter in the park.

"See ya," I said, "and the rabbi, too, I hope."

I trotted off toward the crosswalk and reached it just as the light changed. A small crowd hurried toward me, including Ari, who was walking behind a couple of well-dressed older men and a pair of young women wrapped in sleek trench coats and high-heeled boots-boutique clerks, I figured.

I moved back out of the way and leaned against the cold stone wall of the old Woolworth's building. The older men looked my way and nudged one another, but mercifully they kept walkng. The girls minced by, giggling, in a drift of heavy perfume. When I glanced down the street, I could tell that Sarge was watching me. He was close enough to see what I was doing but too far to recognize Ari, especially considering Ari's clothing, so different from his police outfit of yesterday.

Still, caution demanded I come up with a new wrinkle on my original plan. I opened the jacket and pulled it back on my shoulders to reveal the low-cut blouse. When Ari reached me, I smiled and said, "Hey, good-looking, want a date?"

Ari stopped, looked me over with a perfect poker face, and said, "How much?"

"Depends on what you want."

"Let's discuss it. I'll buy you some breakfast."

"Thanks." I slipped my arm through his. "Sounds good."

I glanced back to see Sarge giving me the thumbs-up sign. He stood to get a share of whatever money this supposed john paid me, if he could deliver the rabbi and his mysterious letter.

Ari and I did go out to breakfast, but over on Irving Street near the apartment in a narrow diner, a throwback to the Fifties with its chrome and beige Formica. The place reeked of decades of frying bacon. Ari ordered pancakes and chicken sausage. I had a scrambled egg and a gla.s.s of skim milk. While we ate, I told him what I'd learned from Sarge. The letter puzzled him as much as it did me.

"How does Reb Ezekiel know your name?" Ari said. "I keep coming back to that."

"Yeah, me, too. The only theory I can come up with is that he's immensely talented, psychically, I mean. This letter may not be an actual piece of paper, you know. It could be some message he saw in a dream with my name attached to it."

"Oh. Then I suppose it could be about aliens and s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps."

"That's my greatest fear, yeah."

Ari poured syrup over the stack of pancakes and dug in. I nibbled at my egg and considered the problem from several possible angles. Zeke might have picked my name up from the aura field if he could access that, and I suspected he could. His images of the Prophet Ezekiel must have derived from it. He might have run across Brother Belial or Caleb and gotten my name-and the letter-from them. The running across might have been physical, or it might have occurred in a trance state. Caleb knew who I was, and just maybe that meant Belial did, too.

"I wish you'd eat like a normal person," Ari said.

I snapped myself back to the present moment. "Say what?"

"You've been picking at that one sodding egg for ten minutes."

I realized he'd gone through most of his breakfast.

"Did you want to leave? I don't have to finish it."

"No, quite the opposite. I want you to finish it. And have some of mine, too."

"This is plenty."

"No, it's not."

We stared narrow-eyed at each other while a waitress hovered in the aisle beside our booth. She looked nervous, as if she expected us to start shouting. It occurred to me that we were on the edge of doing just that. As much as I disliked giving in, I refused to cause a scene in a public place.

"Okay," I said. "I'll shovel it in. If you don't want that last pancake, I'll take it."

He smiled, a tight little expression, and put it on my plate. The waitress smiled in open relief and drifted away to attend to other customers. I shoveled food as promised.

When we left, Ari shoved his hands in his jacket pockets and said not one word. Pa.s.sersby stepped aside to let him go by or walked around him in a wide arc. When we reached the car, I drove, and he said nothing then, either. Nor did he speak as we went upstairs to the apartment. I let us in, then shut and locked the door behind us. I turned around to find Ari scowling at me with his arms crossed over his chest.

"What's wrong now?" I said.

"I don't appreciate having my partner act like a common prost.i.tute."

"It was just my cover. Besides, you sure picked up the cue easily enough."

"I a.s.sumed you had a reason of some sort for the charade."

"It's not like I ever was a hooker, if that's what you're worrying about."

"Of course it isn't! Don't you think I have more respect for you than that?"

I caught myself on the edge of escalating the quarrel. "I don't get it, Ari. What's wrong?"

"I just told you."

"No, you didn't. I mean, I don't think that's the only thing. I don't get why you're so p.i.s.sed off."

"What? You're the one who's so b.l.o.o.d.y psychic."

I thought I understood. "It's all getting to you, isn't it?" I said. "All these things that you thought didn't exist. It must be kind of like culture shock-"

"What a sodding condescending thing to say."

My mental calm tore like wet paper. "Then what's so wrong? You sulky son of a b.i.t.c.h!"

He stared at me, his mouth a little open, as if he wanted to speak but couldn't find words. I stared right back, but I wondered why I wanted to attack despite the SAWM inside my head that was screaming retreat. I felt Qi gathering around me like a cloud of biting flies, sharp and tormenting-his anger, I realized, not mine.

"What are you going to do?" I said. "Hit me?"

Ari tossed his head like a frightened horse, took a deep breath, and stepped back. "Never," he said. "I'm sorry."

The SAWM died away. The cloud of Qi drew back and began to disperse, but slowly, one fly's worth at a time. I felt so physically hot that a rivulet of sweat ran down my back. I took off the heavy jacket and tossed it onto the nearby computer chair, then ran my hands through my hair to lift it off my damp neck. Ari watched me with eyes that showed no feeling at all. I let the hair fall and wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans.

Ari took off his jacket and hung it over the back of the chair with a careful, almost fussy set of gestures, centering the jacket, smoothing the sleeves, turning the collar down. Anger management, I said to myself. They taught him how to calm himself. I'd spotted the techniques before, but I hadn't considered their implication. For the first time, I realized just how dangerous a man he was.

"It takes me over sometimes," he said. "I try not to let it. The rage, that is."