Whisper of a Moment

Disclaimer: Characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television, the WB, and UPN.

Part III

I’m itching to get back to the hotel and start following up my latest information, but I stick to discipline, continuing my tour of the city. Not exactly a dreary task, I can soak up general impressions while I let my mind sift through what I’ve learned. The visible demographic doesn’t quite match the official information: Oxnard’s population is just under 180,000 people, 66% of it Hispanic, but as I cruise the city center I’m seeing almost as many pale faces as brown, the ratio closer to half-and-half than two-to-one; maybe most of the Latinos congregate elsewhere, or maybe this is the wrong time of day. Twice I see South Coast Area Transit buses, and the passenger mix seems to cut across all classes, not like the mass transit nightmare I’ve heard about for the larger cities. There are also more men in uniform than I had expected. The Naval base at Point Mugu only has 9,000 military staff, but somehow their presence is more widespread than their numbers would suggest; I see men in Navy whites situated all through the downtown area, taking in the sights and window shopping and indicating by word and gesture their approval of any nearby females. I draw a few whistles and invitations myself, which doesn’t really move me one way or another, but at least shows I’ll be in the running if I ever get in the mood for a relationship. The last is only an idle thought in passing, the majority of my attention is on the final tidbit I just got from Wesley.

I wasn’t given as much pre-briefing on this job as on most. I understand the reasons (steering clear of causality loops is one of the first things they drum into you), and it was a small cost for the chance to follow out my own plans, though I did a certain amount of grousing for form’s sake; but the bottom line is that I was dropped in here with only the sketchiest of instructions. Find out what I could about Skira’ads as a class. Locate the Skira’ad situated here. Learn as much as possible about that particular individual without making myself known or setting up interference patterns. More data than that, it was suggested, would pose too big a risk of priming me for upline disruption, and they’re really ticky about that kind of thing. I had my own agenda, so I accepted the terms with a small show of disgruntlement.

Now the picture is settling into shape. I’ll bet a year’s rec credit that the Skira’ad I’m supposed to track turns out to be one of the tiny minority that stirs up trouble just by walking down the street: a natural generator of exactly the type of disturbance my people are so hell-bent on making sure we never create. That would certainly explain why a minor demon would be worth the hassle and expense of setting up even such a carefully restricted operation.

I’m no slacker. I always planned to do the job while I checked out my personal sideline issues. I’m half a dozen steps closer to that now, and the third consultant I arranged, just as a backup, all of a sudden looks a lot more promising. It took me time to get moving — that’s how it works, establishing an identity and infiltrating the system and building a cash fund for social and professional lubrication (hell, just finding clothes once I was dropped on that beach!) are all things that have to be seen to before the real work can start — but I’m building up momentum maybe a couple of cycles ahead of schedule.

I swing the Honda over to the curb and pull the StarTac out of its belt clip. I already have the appointment set for tomorrow, but now that he’s no longer an afterthought I’m feeling the need to reinforce the scheduling. This could be really important, and his file doesn’t exactly depict him as one of the most reliable —

Peripheral vision is fuzzy on detail but extra-sensitive to motion. The flash I catch in the corner of my eye is guaranteed to lock my attention: jerky, urgent, well short of panic but clear over the line into agitated. I don’t look, don’t make any quick moves that would pull notice my way; I sit exactly where I am, holding the StarTac but not dialing, and in three or four seconds the subject in question has moved into my direct line of view.

Right. Had to be him. I’m not even surprised at not being surprised.

He’s moving down the sidewalk in fast, jittery strides, the whites of his eyes easily visible as he darts furtive glances toward the street. Pacing him there, in a loose triangle with its base toward him, are three members of Piggy’s crew, two riding Harleys or pretty solid imitations, the third on a cycle whose make I can’t identify but that roughly matches the others in size and style and apparent power. The engines are running barely above an idle, the deep throbbing grumble of a lion that’s not inclined to move but wants you to know he’s watching you; the riders are grinning to each other and to the geek on the sidewalk, they’re not ready to land on him yet (too much fun to watch him sweat for awhile), but they’re making it clear that he’s not getting away without the kind of hard time that usually means long-term rehab.

Two thoughts hit me at once. The first, springing both from my training and from my own preferences, is, I really don’t need this. The second is that I don’t have a choice. The CroMags wouldn’t be on him if I hadn’t inserted myself into a process already in motion; which means, at the professional level, that I’ve initiated an aberration I have to correct, and on the personal side, I owe him some help whether I like it or not.

I only wanted to see him, damn it, get a look and move on. Repeated interaction was not on my agenda. There’s no helping it, though, calling the police would bring in too many new variables. Somehow I have to pull events back into line, which means direct action.

I truly don’t like him. And I’m starting to get tired of this city, too.

That whole sequence of thought takes something like two seconds. I use another two to extrapolate their likely course for the next several minutes, then I’m parking the bike and crossing the street to the nearest automatic teller machine, pulling the card connecter from the slung handbag even as I arrive. I poke the key card into the slot and catch the leads on the trailing wires; quick glance to be sure I’m not being observed, then I position the leads in the proper spots at the base of my skull, and push.

Like always, I flinch as the metal points puncture the thickened pads culture-grown just under the surface of the skin. It doesn’t hurt, the sensory neurons there have been permanently deadened, but there’s a wrongness to the crunch of gristle being penetrated that never lessens for me no matter how many times I go through it. Unwelcome, but necessary, and a small price: in the next instant, infinity opens up to me, and I’m back where I belong.

I damp down on the euphoric rush of entry, there’s no time, I keep the channel narrow and center on the immediate task. It only takes a few moments; the ATM lets me into the bank computer, and from there I can reach out to anywhere, and I’m not really thinking at lightspeed (the data flow still has to pass through a pitiful, plodding organic brain) but the synergy between my neural network and the microchip embedded there accelerates my thought processes a thousandfold. Most of what I needed, I had set up in advance and just have to trigger; the few extra commands are instituted as quickly as I can think of them, and then it’s time to pull back, pull out, let go and get moving.

It’s jumping off a supersonic transport and landing on sandpaper skis pointing uphill, which means I take longer on the transition than I did doing my work in virtual space. Even so, before Harris and the Pig Posse finish making the corner at the end of the block I’m back on the Honda, kicking over the engine and heading out.

Away from them.

In any conflict, whatever the type, there’s one guideline you have to follow: never play fair. ‘Fair’ means by the rules, and rules means it’s a game, not a fight … but the silly fact is that most fights do have rules, inherent or taken for granted, so if you can recognize the rules, you can figure which ones to break for best advantage.

The Posse, probably without thinking of it in those terms, is following two sets of rules right now. The first is contained in their pack hierarchy: somebody messes with one of yours, you seriously mess with him. A subset of this prescribed behavior deals with the style of retribution, which in some circumstances would be an excruciating bloody spectator sport, but here and now means they’re going to drag it out, let him stew in his own helplessness while they herd him through the center of a well-populated city, only a few yards from aid and safety but unable to access either one.

The second set of rules is dictated by the immediate physical and social situation. As soon as I recognized that I might find myself back at odds with these losers, I did a fast online sweep for info on motorcycle gangs in general, with particular attention to this specific outfit. I found that, in the main, groups like this work hard at looking tough. They may occasionally tangle with outnumbered civilians (or less frequently with rival crews), but the whole mythos about them rolling into a town and riding roughshod over the citizenry is strictly movie stuff; any bunch that tried that would have everybody from the county constable to the National Guard lining the highways to hose them down with bullets. The Pig Posse’s behavior runs in subconscious acknowledgment of this need to keep a relatively low profile. They want to be noticed, and feared, but they can’t afford to cross from potential threat to immediate danger; so, they’ll chivvy the geek away from the public eye before starting in with boots and chains.

All of that gives me time, opportunity, and the beginnings of a strategy.

The Posse and their target are moving at brisk walking speed, so I easily cover two faces of the block while they’re completing one on the opposite side. I’m in no rush, I’m gauging traffic flows and patterns, measuring it against the pace of the others and the optimum timing window; in fact, I slow just a bit so Harris and I will reach the second corner more or less simultaneously. He checks for a second at the sight of yet another motorcycle about to cut across his path, then continues on toward me as I turn my face his way for a second to give him a clear look at me.

Okay: the geek, the Posse, the traffic signal, the vehicles passing through at the cross street … this is the best I’ll have to work with, so I’ll have to make it count. I pitch my voice to a level that should reach him without carrying to his pursuers, and say conversationally, “Jump on when I give the signal.”

His mouth tightens. Not looking directly my way, he gives me a half-inch nod, and steadies his steps. I’m coasting now; when I’m almost at the cross street and he’s almost at the curb, I say, “Now,” and hit the throttle.

No hesitation, you have to give the boy credit. He lands in the saddle behind me as the Honda surges forward, and we zip through the intersection at the exact moment the light facing us turns green. We caught the Posse off guard, they’ll be able to hang a right onto the street behind us as soon as a gap opens, but for now we should have a solid six-second lead. I make the most of it, jinking around the cars ahead of us and jamming the RPMs to redline.

The boy behind me hangs on with a desperate disregard that I could take personally if either of us had time to pay attention. “Oh, man,” he moans, his mouth about three inches from my ear. “Are you gonna be able to outrun ’em?”

I don’t answer in words, but my laugh is a hard bark that cuts through the scream of the motor. Your standard Harley has an 1800cc engine (I looked it up), almost three times the capacity of what I’m riding; if it was just a matter of speed, we’d be cooked before we started. My bike accelerates faster, though, and it’s a lot more agile, and I have a clear picture in my head of the city grid for this section and a feel for the traffic rhythms. That’s the hand I’m playing.

He starts to say something else, yelps and grabs tighter as I nearly cut out from under him in a hard left. It’s not fast enough to keep the Pig Posse from seeing where we went, I get a shutter-blink glimpse of them in the side mirror before we’re through the turn, but again they’ll have to find a break in the vehicle flow before they can follow. “Shut up!” I call back to him. “Hang on, keep your balance over the centerline, and shut up!”

I don’t have a hope of losing them, but I put on a show anyhow, all frantic swerves and rubber-smoking cutovers, the geek clinging to me like a lamprey and whimpering at intervals. The Posse trails me happily, so gleeful at our inability to shake them that they don’t notice we’re managing to hold our lead. Or don’t care, maybe; they have the advantage in numbers and machinery, it’s all a matter of steering us to a place where a) we can no longer dodge effectively, and b) there are no witnesses.

I’m ready for things to go wrong, I have three different contingency strategies in reserve, but the operation stays routine. By the time they notice the sirens, the sound is really close; I go straight for it, with a contemptuous little wave down my backtrail. One by one they peel off and zoom away, vanishing from my mirrors, but I don’t let up till we meet the two police cars, tearing past with lights and sound going full-blast. Then I tuck into a side street, cruise to a stop, and say flatly, “Off. Crisis over, free gropes now off the menu.”

His hands fly away from me fast as magnetic repulsion, and half a second later he’s standing away from the bike. “Okay, that was a nice, gulpalicious few minutes,” he observes. “Glad my taxes are giving our local law enforcement plenty of zippy caffeine to wash down all those doughnuts.” He tilts his head a little and looks me over. “Coincidence, right? Or did you drop a dime?”

“I’m pretty sure they were on their way to something else,” I say, looking back where we came from. (A silent alarm going off without any visible reason, for instance.) “If anybody had put in a call, it would have been about the way we were streaking through traffic, but it didn’t look like the super troopers were interested in us. Our lucky break for the day.”

“I’ll make a note to sacrifice another Twinkie to the gods of the Lucky Break,” he says, nodding agreement. Then his face settles into an exaggerated severity, and he adds, “So-o-oo, isn’t this where I chew you out for leaping to my rescue without being invited?”

As a dig it’s pretty mild, but it still increases my regard for him, just a little. I show it by curling my lip in blistering disdain. “What, you’re gonna file a complaint? I hadn’t come along, those scuzzwipes would’ve chopped you into wussy lasagna.”

“Just pointing out the oh-so-subtle parallels,” he says in return. “What is it with you women? Do you just assume a guy can’t handle himself?” There’s no heat behind the words; he’s enjoying himself, watching to see if he can get under my skin.

No chance. “Wait, don’t tell me,” I say. “I know the next part: something about three to one, wasn’t it?”

He shakes his head, easy and amiable. “Well, how about that?” he says. “You remember the line. And there I thought you were too busy troweling on the righteous indignation to pay any attention to my incisive reasoning.”

“I didn’t give it much credit, but I did notice,” I fire back. “Just like I notice you’re trying to slide away from the fact that I pulled you out of crap soup while you were wishing you could scream loud enough for your daddy to hear you.”

Something jerks in his eyes when I say “daddy” (most people wouldn’t notice, but hey, I’ve got issues of my own), but smile and voice don’t carry whatever it is. “Could be,” he says gently. “But ya never knows, does ya? I’ve been up against gang members before; I’m still here, and they …” Disarming grin, calculated twinkle in the eye. “They took up horticulture.”

He’s got tone and tempo perfect, so out of respect I give him the line. “Horticulture?”

“Intensive study of root systems,” he says, straight-faced. “From underneath.”

It’s a damned good turn of phrase, but I act like my laugh is in reaction to the attached claim. “You took out a gang, on your own? What, were they standing over a trapdoor?”

“Fast moving and clean living,” he tells me. “One was strategy, one was luck, one was pure terror and adrenaline, and the last one, the leader, I stared him down and convinced him to take his nefarious evilness to somebody else’s playground.”

I can feel my face harden; this story is new to me, but it has an authentic feel to it, and I’m damned if I’ll be impressed. “Hip-hip for you,” I sneer. “Bet you trot the story out for your best buddies whenever life makes you its butt-monkey.”

He regards me with raised eyebrows. “ ‘Butt-monkey?’ No, I’ve never told anybody about that.” He frowns. “I don’t even know why I told you. There’s just something …” He stops, seconds from death; if he says, There’s something special about you, I absolutely will rip out his windpipe. Oblivious, he gives his head a sharp shake. “It’s weird. You really seem familiar. I mean, sure, we never met before yesterday, but I feel like I ought to know you, I just can’t say why.”

“Women don’t stick in your memory that long, huh?” I can’t help myself; the antagonism is genuine, but once again it’s outside my control.

He caught my mood change when it hit, I could see it in the little muscles around his eyes and mouth, the shift and squaring of his shoulders; now he just gives it up, and sighs. “Always thought it was the other way around, myself. Anyway, thanks for helping. You didn’t have to, and I really appreciate it. In, you know, a manly way.”

He keeps doing that, and it just makes me more angry: why can’t he act in a manner that’ll let me hate him properly? Moving chaos, I called him before, and his effect on me has my emotions caroming in every direction like an overcharged pinball. I tell him to go stuff it, except what comes out is, “Which way were you headed before those leather-jockeys picked you up?” He looks confused at the sudden switchback (join the club, Harris!), and I add defensively, “It’s just a ride, okay? It doesn’t have to mean we’re engaged.”

This time he sits an extra inch back of me as I drive, resting his hands on my shoulders rather than hanging on normally. We don’t talk. I follow a route that won’t cross the path we took here, swinging wide of where I figure we’d be most likely to run into the Posse again, so the return trip is substantially longer. When I’m roughly parallel to where I first saw him, I ask, “Where from here?”

“Um, right at the light there, straight for four-five blocks, then bear right again at the little cul-de-sac. That’ll put me close enough.”

Either from sheer contrariness or from some impulse I can’t trace, I keep going once I reach the designated point, asking, “Which one?”

He indicates a two-story house halfway down the block: older style, modest but based on what was in vogue just before the 20th century came piling in. He’s off the bike the moment I ease to a stop, again steering well away from unnecessary touch. “Decent digs,” I observe. (What, am I trying to stretch out the interaction here? That would be just too pathetic, so I add a barb to the next words.) “I had you figured for a basement somewhere.”

“I wish,” he says with a shake of his head. “I get a room at a weekly rate that leaves my wallet bleeding but not quite dead, and I’m supposed to keep any showers to five minutes or less.” Some of the open, ironic smile is back. “Be it ever so humble, you can always find someplace humbler.”

The humor that comes so easily to him is insidious and dangerous; I don’t want to like this character, and I can’t afford to let myself start. “SoCal has a mild climate,” I point out. “You can always find a heating grate to sleep on, and a trash bag to keep the rain off.”

“And don’t think that doesn’t feature heavily in my long-term retirement plan,” he replies with unruffled cheer. “Along with a big sign that says WILL WORK FOR CHEET-OHS.”

Okay, that’s it, I’ll never be able to hold my own in verbal sparring while the crazy stuff inside me keeps clipping me at the ankles. I’m about to cut it off fast, make an exit and find a nice thick tree to brain myself against, when a sharp bang! makes me spin and drop. Overreaction, it’s just a backfire from an antique Saturn passing at the start of the block, I place the sound in a fifth of a second and am already straightening up when Harris grabs me, once again trying to shove me behind him in that automatic protective reflex. I throw him back in a spasm of total blind fury, snarling, “Hands off, Zeppo Boy —!”

Quick as it happens, it’s still like some awful slow-motion rail smash. I can feel the words before they leave my lips, and I know I can’t say them, but the part of me that talks is on an entirely different track from the part that thinks, and I’m helpless to stop it from coming out. Still, though it’s nothing like my jacked-in speed, my mind is running at a rate that only barely corresponds to thought as we know it: not a linear process, but huge chunks of raw concept slamming through like freight trucks. Even as I’m smacking him away, I realize three things in instant slipstream succession.

First, I’ve stuck my head in it up to the shoulders, there’s no remotely normal explanation for my possessing the trivial, arcane knowledge contained in the single pejorative reference. Second, he probably won’t catch it if I talk quick enough and produce a sufficient volume of masking diversion, he’s not stupid but his is not the most focused brain on the continent. Third, I can’t risk it, my idiot mouth has created a problem I’ll have to attack pre-emptively.

I’ve screwed up. I have to do something to fix it. It has to be now.

Realization and act are simultaneous. I stagger, yanking my hand away from his (our first skin-to-skin contact, I think I can use that as a selling point), and stare at him like he just sprouted horns. “Vampires?” I say, breathing the word as if I can barely get it out. “Freaking vampires? And … zombies, witches, werewolves, mummies —?” It would be good if my face were white, but I can’t actually control my autonomic reactions, so I bug out my eyes and let my jaw sag and shrink back away from him. “I thought I’d seen some weird-assed stuff in Philly, but this … godamighty, what are you?” I ‘pull myself together’, narrowing my eyes and making a show of reestablishing control. “And … and just what the hell is a Slayer, anyway?”

He takes it blank-faced; either he’s slow on the uptake, or nothing shows until he’s ready to let it out. “Okay, that wasn’t what I was expecting,” he murmurs at last. “Let’s see: Christopher Walken, Dead Zone, vision flashes whenever he touched somebody …” His gaze sharpens. “You’re psychic?”

I shake my head, the perfect figure of anger and embarrassment. “I don’t know, I just see things sometimes. Not very often, and nowhere near as strong as that one.” I glare at him, tough chick trying to use aggression to grab back the initiative. “All that mess I saw, was it the real deal, or do you just do drugs by the boatload?”

He grins at that. “I come from a town that, if you read the local news, would have to be the PCP capital of North America. But no, none for me, unless you count pizza as a mind-altering substance.”

“Yeah, right. Look, I gotta go.” I back away, making a show of avoiding further contact. “Nothing personal, I just … I gotta go.”

He doesn’t say anything as I remount the bike and pull out, he just stands watching. Once I’ve put a couple of blocks between us, I do a fast respool of my goof and instant repair, and all my judgment tells me I covered myself solid.

It doesn’t change the seriousness of my blunder. I’m out of control where he’s concerned, a disaster in process. I can’t afford any more of that, it’s gone too far already. I have to cut all my links to him: no more, ever, under any circumstances. Done, gone, over, finito.

Should be easy, right? I never wanted to deal with him one-on-one in the first place.

No problem. No problem. I’m good now.
 

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