“He may need us. It’s not a strong hunch, I admit, but it’s persistent
and… weird.”
“If he needs help urgently,” she said,
“then we’d never get to him in time, anyway. And if it’s not so urgent,
it’ll be okay if we go on to Santa Barbara, call again from the motel.
If he’s sick or been hurt or something, the extra driving from here to
Santa Barbara and back will only add about an hour.”
“Well…
“He’s my brother, Bobby. I care about him as much as you do, and I say
it’ll be all right. I love you, but you’ve never shown enough talent as
a psychic to make me hysterical a this.” He nodded.
“You’re right. I’m just… jumpy. My knees haven’t settled down since
all that traveling with Frank.” Back on the highway, a few thing
tendrils of fog were creep in from the sea. Sprinkles of rain fell
again, then stopped a less than a minute. The heaviness of the air, and
an indefina but undeniable quality of oppressiveness in the utterly blue
night sky, portended a major storm.
When they had gone a couple of miles, Bobby said, should’ve called Hal
at the office. While he’s sitting around there waiting for Frank, he
could use some of our contactsthe phone company, the cops, make sure
everything’s jake Cielo Vista.”
“If the lines are still out when you make the call from motel,” Julie
said,
“then you can bother Hal about it.” FROM THE weak psychic residue on
the drinking glass, Can received an image of Julie Dakota that was
recognizablysame face that had seeped from Thomas’s mind earlier
inevening-except that it was not as idealized as it had been Thomas’s
memory. With his sixth sense he saw that she had gone home from the
office, to the address he had obtained earlier from the secret’s
Rolodex. She hadthere a she ry bee time, then had gone somewhere in a
car with another pers most likely the man named Bobby. He could see no
more, a he wished that the traces she left behind had been as stro as
those of Jaxx.
He put down the tumbler and decided to go to her hou Though she and
Bobby were not there now, he might be a to find an object that would,
like the liquor glass, lead him a other step or two along their trail.
If he found nothing, could return here and continue his search, assuming
the police had not arrived in response to the discovery of the dead m
outside.
mw LEE SWITCHED off the computer, then cut off the CD player too-Huey
Lewis and The News were in the middle of
“Walking On a Thin Line”-and removed the earphones.
Happy after a long and productive session in the land of silicon and
gallium arsenide, he stood, stretched, yawned, and checked his watch. A
little after nine. He’d been at work for twelve hours.
He should have wanted nothing more than to flop in bed and sleep half a
day. But he figured he’d zip back to his condo, which was ten minutes
from the office, freshen up, and catch some nightlife. Last week he’d
found a new club, Nuclear Grin, where the music was loud and hard-edgd,
the drinks unwatered, the crowd’s politics unconsciously libertarian,
and the women hot. He wanted to dance a little, drink a little, and
find someone who wanted to screw her brains out.
In this age of new diseases, sex was risky; it sometimes seemed that
drinking from the same glass as someone else was suicidal. But after a
day in the painstakingly logical microchip universe, you had to get a
little wild, take some risks, dance on the edge of chaos, to get some
balance in your life.
Then he remembered how Frank and Bobby had vanished in front of his
eyes. He wondered if maybe he hadn’t already had enough wildness for
one day.
He picked up the latest printouts. It was more stuff that he had
gleaned from police records, regarding the decidedly weird behavior of
Mr Blue, who would never need to get a little wild for balance, since he
was already chaos walking around in shoes. Lee opened the door,