The Bone Triangle (13 page)

“I can’t go back to the house, not even after the cops leave,” Jacqueline said.

“Why not?”

“Don’t you think they’ll notice my collection?”

“The shoes…yeah, of course they will. Did they fingerprint you when they picked you up at the mall?”

“No, they do that at the police station, don’t they?”

“Sure. In that case, you might be in the clear. Unless you have other prior arrests?”

She was quiet for a minute. “There was a DUI, back in college.”

I sighed. “In that case, you’d better stay low for a while.”

She mumbled something about bad luck and me. I couldn’t blame her. She wasn’t the first girl who’d hooked up with me who had put that equation together.

We headed out for the Strip. We turned off the invisibility effect in an alleyway, then stepped out to flag down a cab. The driver gave us a pair of raised eyebrows. I could tell he’d instantly categorized us as trouble.

“Where to?”

“Henderson,” I said.

He shook his head. “No way. Get out, please.”

“Come on, I’ve got cash. Plenty of it.”

“I heard the shots from back that way.”

“Nothing to do with us. I’ll give you an extra hundred.”

“Give me a break. I don’t want stolen money. You have a girl with you, and her cats. You look like you just ran a mile. Get out of my cab, please, or I’m calling for help.”

I saw in his eyes he meant business. We got out of the car and returned to the sidewalk.

“We have to get another cab, really fast,” I told Jacqueline.

“Why?”

“He’s already calling us in. I’m sure of it.”

Jacqueline grabbed my hand and my vision dimmed. A woman in a straw hat gasped, “Did you see that?”

“What?” asked her husband in an annoyed voice. “Just help me find the car.”

We hurried up the street, trying to move from one building’s shadow to the next, while the couple behind us argued.

We traveled a block, heading north. It was an experience, and taught me that walking around invisible was, in some ways, kind of a pain. You had to duck and dodge everyone on the street. If there were too many people present, you had to stand to the side and couldn’t walk at all. Not unless you wanted people to slam into you.

“You could open any of these cars,” Jacqueline said as we passed a parking lot. “Could you use your sunglasses to start an engine?”

“I doubt it, and besides, I’m not a thief.”

“Give them to me, I’ll do it.”

“No way,” I said. I was annoyed. I wondered how she’d figured out it was my sunglasses that gave me the power to open things. She was apparently quite observant. I imagined watching me put on sunglasses after midnight had been an obvious clue.

“I have a plan,” I told her. We came to a big hotel with Roman statues surrounding it and stepped inside. I led her
to the restroom area and took her into the men’s room. When no one was looking, I released her hand.

“You stay out of sight. I’ll walk out of here with your bag and have the doormen catch me a cab. Everyone will assume I’m a hotel patron. I’ll scoot all the way across the seats, and you can climb in behind me.”

“What about Mittens and Flasher?”

I blinked for a second, then realized she meant her cats. “Right. Try to keep them quiet, and on your lap. I’ll carry everything else.”

We executed the plan flawlessly. I knew there were cameras everywhere, and possibly someone had noticed us walking in and out of the men’s room together, but no one came to complain about it. The doorman flagged down a cab, I went to climb in, but I realized as he held the door open for me that he was hoping for a tip for this tiny service. He smiled at me, waiting for me to get in.

“You get in first,” I said.

His smile faltered. “What, sir?”

I watched until the seat depressed in the form of a shapely rump. The depression quickly scooted away to the far side.

“Just a joke,” I said, handing him a five and climbing into the cab.

He chuckled uncertainly and thanked me for the tip. I sighed once we reached the highway. I would be home in a few minutes.

“He thought you were propositioning him, you know,” Jacqueline said.

I thought about it, and laughed. “I guess you’re right.”

The cabbie wore a turban, a sweeping mustache, and a wary look. He had his eyes on me in the rearview mirror. As far as the driver knew, I was talking to myself in varied
voices in the backseat. Knowing I’d been labeled a weirdo yet again, I avoided his glances.

The drive went without further incident, except for one bad moment when Mittens and Flasher got into a disagreement about something. I should have expected this. After all, Jacqueline kept them invisible and they couldn’t see whose tail they were chewing on in there.

At long last, we reached the mansion. I got everything out, making sure Jacqueline and her cats were in the driveway before I gave the cabbie a hundred, which he took from my hand with a frown and a stare.

“Keep the change,” I said.

This warmed him up a bit. “Do you want I should stay waiting, sir?”

“No. Thanks again.”

He finally drove away and I opened the gates. Jacqueline gasped next to me and became visible. She put her cats down and put her hands to her mouth. “You didn’t tell me you were rich!”

I shrugged. “A wealthy man learns not to flaunt it,” I said. “I prefer to get honest reactions from people.”

“Smart,” she said, walking up the driveway.

We passed the powered iron gates, which swung closed behind us. In the middle of the large circular drive was a fountain. I’d had it cleaned out a while back, but now the water merely trickled from the centerpiece. The koi fish in the bowl swam lazily in a murky morass of lily pads and algae.

“Hmm…” she said, taking it all in. “I think you need to fire the gardener.”

I cleared my throat and mumbled in agreement. I wondered what she was going to say when she saw Ezzie’s scorched-carpet trail across the living room.

I thought carefully about my next move. I had a long list of people I needed to talk to. Dr. Meng had, as far as I could determine, made two attempts on my life in a week’s time. There was no reason for her to stop now. Logically, if she kept taking shots at me, eventually one of them would succeed and her problem would be solved.

I knew who was responsible for these attacks, but I couldn’t very well march into Meng’s office and talk to her about it—not even with an armed team behind me.
Especially
not with an armed team behind me. Inside her sanatorium, she was an empress. She could mesmerize any allies I dared take into her domain and force them to shoot me in the back. Meng could control people’s minds. She could give them commands they would continue following even after they’d left her presence.

Once, I’d been under the influence of her powers, and I’d been a witless guest in her locked, padded rooms. I did
not question her strength. If I went to the Sunset alone, her minions would attack me, even as her assassins did now. But it would be worse, as there would be a crowd of them. They would be fanatical in her service, and I could not hope to overcome them all.

She was angry with me because I’d gone into her domain and bested her once. I’d nearly killed her, in fact. But I could not hope to repeat the deed. At our last meeting, she’d been lulled by the fact that she believed I was in her power. This time, I would have no such advantage. The moment I arrived, the fight would be on. I was immune to her powers, but I would be alone. Even if I went heavily armed, it would be a bloodbath, and I didn’t want to kill innocent people under her influence—or die myself in the process.

I sighed. This wasn’t going to be easy. I had several other problems as well. One of these difficulties was chattering brightly and feeding her cats in my kitchen. Jacqueline was undaunted by the scorch marks and the lack of furniture. She seemed genuinely excited by my adventures. The physical evidence she saw of them around the house only piqued her interest. I supposed I should have expected that reaction. People with powerful artifacts frequently became daredevils. I’d never been sure why I wasn’t affected that way. This was another of my personal mysteries.

“Cheer up, Quentin,” Jacqueline told me. “Let’s have a drink and talk about our next move.”

Her pretty face made it easy to smile. I sat on the couch with her after removing all my sheets and pillows. I threw them in the washer and dumped in a double load of detergent. When I returned I found her scolding Flasher, who’d had an accident on my imported tile.

I enjoyed her company and soon I was in a much better mood. I tried telling her my house was a dangerous place to
be, perhaps worse than the Triangle itself, but she wouldn’t listen. As far as she was concerned, she was immune to danger. If things became dicey, she’d simply vanish. Maybe she was right, but I wasn’t so sure.

We ordered takeout and talked for an hour or so.

“The trouble is, we need information,” she said after we’d carefully discussed the events of the past few days. “You have several enemies, but this Meng person seems to be the worst. I’ll go in there and check the place out, if you want me to. She can’t grab my mind if she can’t even see me.”

“No,” I said. “That would be a bad idea. There are cameras everywhere. Even if you did get through, what would you do? I can’t ask you to kill her, and it’s unlikely she’d accidentally say something useful while you haunted her office.”

“Hmm,” she said, sighing. “You’re right, my power is best used for assassination or theft. Not the most positive options. I mean, if you knew where there was a key or something, I could go get it. That would be about it.”

“A key to what?”

“I don’t know. I’m just saying—that’s when I could help you.”

I thought the possibility over, but nothing useful popped into my mind.

We talked next about the monster in the Triangle. Whatever it was, the phenomenon didn’t seem to be related to Meng’s vendetta against me. It had been killing people in the area long before I reached the neighborhood. The attacks had become more frequent recently, but I wasn’t sure if this was related to Meng’s assassins or Ezzie’s disappearance.

“The only person who likes you in this town—besides me, of course—is this Rostok guy, right?” Jacqueline asked.

I shook my head. “There is someone else. Gilling is his name. He leads a group of minor rogues. We’ve helped each other in the past.”

“Does he know much?”

I nodded appreciatively. “Yes, in fact I think he knows as much as anyone does about the strange happenings in this town. I think I’ll contact him. Thanks for the idea.”

She beamed. Sometimes, she seemed too young for me, even though we were only a few years apart in age. Early thirties and late twenties were different, especially when you’d lived through as many odd events as I had.

“How do we get ahold of this Gilling person?” she asked me.

“We can try to phone him, but he’s more into his artifacts. Like me, he has more than one. He’s left something with me that allows me to contact him.”

She bounced on the couch, coming closer to me. She leaned closer still and whispered conspiratorially. “What’s his best one do?”

I smiled. “He can open rips in space. Rips between this world and others—even between one spot on Earth and another.”

“Wow,” she said, nodding. “That is true power.”

“It takes some setup, though,” I said. “But once it’s working, he can move an army from one place to another.”

“Let’s summon this jinni,” she said excitedly.

I began to stand up, but she grabbed my hand and pulled me back down. I looked at her in surprise.

“There’s something we’ve got to do first,” she said.

Then she kissed me. It was a real kiss this time, not just a peck of gratitude or a distraction while she reached into my pockets.

Surprised, I recoiled a fraction, but then relaxed and went with it. We kissed nicely for about ten seconds. By the end of it, I was ready for more.

Evading my grasp, she bounced up and headed for the cellar door. I stood and took a few steps after her.

“Um,” I said, bewildered. “What was that about?”

“We’ve both been thinking about kissing. I just wanted to get it out of the way, so we could think clearly about our next mission together.”

I blinked at her. I was not feeling
less
distracted. If anything, she’d added a whole new dimension to the thoughts churning in the back of my mind. Sighing, I followed her down the charred steps into the cellar.

“Where exactly are you going?” I asked her.

“I don’t know, but I’ve been listening to your stories. Just about everything weird that happens here starts or ends in this cellar, doesn’t it? I figured whatever you use to contact Gilling has to be down here.”

I frowned and nodded. Her logic was irrefutable. Gilling’s book was down here; I’d always kept it downstairs. Gilling liked the cool, dry environment of the cellar, declaring it safe for an ancient volume of parchment. I didn’t know why he cared about the conditions under which the book was kept, as all artifacts of power were essentially indestructible. Maybe he did so out of force of habit.