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Twenty-eight

Sno was once more by the creek bank, once more alone, once more left out because she wasn't a guy, because she wasn't from Washington, because she'd never seen a war. Damn men. You couldn't talk to them. Oh, as long as you listened it was fine. But as soon as you tried to talk to them about something important to you, they turned off and acted bored.

All she'd done was ask who lived up the creek, and did they know her.

"Look," Trip-Wire said. "You're an okay kid, but no more women, all right?"

"I didn't invite her to come over and cook supper," Sno said. "I just talked to her. She said she lived up the creek. All I wondered was if you knew who she was."

"Sno baby, ain't nobody lives up the creek, with or without a paddle," Maurice told her, chortling to himself as if he was being really cute.

"She said different," Sno told him.

"Doc, you know what you said earlier about the 'Yards," Red-Eye interrupted, as if he hadn't realized anybody at all was talking. "I think if we'd had more of them . . ."

She tuned them out then, just like they'd tuned her out. The impulse she had to tell them about her joint and to offer to share completely vanished, and now here she was again, sitting on the creek bank while they were in their stupid sweat lodge playing their stupid drums and talking about a stupid war which happened way before she was born and which they were stupid to have gotten involved with.

After they'd gone this morning, she dislodged the joint from the place where she'd left it to dry next to the fireplace, and now it was ready for her to mellow out with. By herself. They could all get stuffed.

She lit the end and stuck the joint in her mouth and took a long, long drag.

It didn't smell quite right, but then, she wasn't all that experienced with it. She noticed that the end of the cigarette was yellowish. Maybe somebody had cut the weed with curry powder, by the look of it. Weird. She hoped it would still make her high.

With her next puff, she realized that this was very strong stuff. Her face felt like she was wearing one of those cleansing masks that dried on your skin to suck out the blackheads and pimples. Even her neck felt stiff.

She reached up to touch her face, and her arm jerked and cramped. So did the other one. She tried to get up, but her legs were cramping now too. She screamed, but her mouth wouldn't move far enough to let the sound out, so the scream stayed trapped inside her as her whole body jerked and shook in one long agonizing spasm.

 

 * * *

 

Felicity heard the scream halfway down I-5.

"Oh, my word! It's Sno!" she cried.

"I beg your pardon?" Prudence said calmly.

"One of the girls I was trying to help. She's dying. Oh, please, Prudence, just a bit more magic. It's life and death . . ."

"Isn't it always?" Prudence asked in a battle-weary tone that any of Sno Quantrill's companions would have recognized. "We're on our way, and that's the best we can do, unless you'd like to stop and call 911?"

"Don't be ridiculous! Half of Whatcom County is already searching for her. She's been missing in the woods for days. And she's not the one we're headed toward."

"Do you want me to get off at the next exit?"

"No. No, Rose is in deadly danger too, and there's a child, and Puss and Dico won't be enough . . .all of that and Bobby's gone missing."

"What?"

"Bobby. The executioner. The hunter. The hit man. The little toad. I can't imagine what happened to him."

"Flitters, I think you need a vacation. A cheap one, mind you. Your mind is wandering. I thought you had two people in deadly danger, and you're worried about a toad?"

Felicity gave her a very cold look. "It's not as if he's a real toad, Prudence, even if there was anything wrong with that. He's an enchanted hit man, or at least contains the personality of one in the body of an innocent creature, and I'm responsible. Oh, dear, oh, dear."

"What do you want me to do, Flitters?" Prudence demanded.

"Loan me one of your own magicks," Felicity said immediately. Prudence sucked in her breath, shocked. "Just one," Felicity said. "I simply can't help everyone without a little magic."

"If I give you one of mine, how will you spend it?"

"That," Felicity said, "is an excellent question."

 

* * * 

 

Having grown up around animals, Fred was amused by the antics of the enterprising alley cat going from car to car begging food. It surprised him a little, when, in the middle of eating ice cream, the cat suddenly looked up, made a couple of almost-human sounding utterances, and then ran away as if a pack of dogs was on its tail.

He shrugged. Cats were like that, operating on a logic all their own, but for an alley cat to leave food freely offered and safely guarded he suspected it took considerable provocation. The car ferry from Bremerton was late this morning, and even after it arrived, the cars did not immediately begin unloading.

Fred opened the car door again and stood watching, trying to see what happened. One of the loading crew from the parking lot passed by, and Fred asked, "What seems to be the problem?"

"Somebody didn't return to their car," the orange-vested woman said, shrugging. "Probably asleep on the passenger deck."

 

* * *

 

Rose had begun to wonder if the car deck bathroom had any kind of an independent air supply. It was cold in there, and stuffy. She wondered how she could make a weapon from the mop or a bulletproof vest, maybe, from the bucket half-blocking the way to the door.

Periodically the man with the gun would knock on the door, quietly, so as not to draw attention to himself. After a time she felt the ferry stop, though the engines continued to run, and over them she could hear faintly the static noise of an announcement being made on the intercom, once, twice, three times. The man kept knocking on the door until finally he got tired and stopped.

Could he have gone away? Was it a trick? She sat on the stool, completely dressed now, a while longer, gathering the courage to open the door and find out, while the deck shook beneath her. Surely that was the sound of cars unloading? She was parked at the front end of the ferry—they must have had everyone drive around her and then pushed her car off. Would the crew members have found her assailant and forced him to deal with the car? If so, he should be gone now.

She'd been cooped up so long it was hard to believe she was free, but she shot the bolt on the door and peeked around. For a fleeting moment she saw the back end of the last two cars, one of which was her own. Two crew members were arguing with her assailant, who was walking beside the car. Belatedly, Rose realized that the hard, pointy object digging a hole in her hip was the car keys.

She stepped out onto the deck and headed for the staircase when the orange-vested crew members on the bow waved the first two cars in the long, snaking lines aboard the ferry.

Just as she was about to slip past them, onto the ramp and to freedom, a tear-smeared little face steaming up a car window caught her eye. The blonde curls—little kids tended to look a lot alike at that age but—wasn't that Gigi Bjornsen?

 

* * * 

 

Fred watched as the cars unloaded around the disabled vehicle, then saw the last car being pushed out, while two crewmen talked to a man who was presumably the driver. Poor bastard probably couldn't get it started, but why wasn't he in it?

Fred was curious both by nature and by training, and he was a great believer in synchronicity. He was looking for Rose, whose absence had not been explained, and before he'd even started searching, something else a little odd was happening. He knew they were going to start loading the cars pretty soon and he'd be in the way, but a cop had to do what a cop had to do, and he had to know who the guy was whose car had been pushed off the ferry and why he wasn't behind the wheel when it was pushed. The closer he got to the side parking lot where the car had been pushed and the crewmen were arguing with the man, the more familiar the man looked—and sounded.

"Why, hello, Your Honor," he said, greeting Judge Throckmorton. "Having a little car trouble?"

"Who the hell are you?" the judge demanded.

Fred pulled out his ID and badge, peering around the judge to the license plate of the car. "Fred Moran, KCPD, sir. Maybe I can be of assistance here."

"Yeah," said one of the crewmen, a burly, balding red-head who was clearly angry above and beyond the call of duty. "You can arrest his Honor here for obstructing traffic."

"If you want to prefer charges, sure, but the state generally doesn't push it in incidents like this."

"We had to drag him away from the door in front of car deck head and then he says he lost the keys overboard."

"Not enough coffee yet this morning, I'm afraid," the judge said, changing tactics and smiling ingratiatingly at Fred.

Fred was jotting down the license number already. "Yeah, me neither, sir. I understand. Mind telling me whose vehicle this is, sir?"

"Why it's my—" Fred thought he was going to say "mine" and stopped. That must mean he knew that the police would know his own license number. Which meant that he had called Rose's answering machine. " . . .a friend of mine's. Mine—" He paused, trying, Fred thought, to see if he could come up with a story that would stand up to investigation.

"You know how it is, sir. I'd like to call your friend and just make sure, especially with the registration locked inside and all. Come with me and we'll call you a locksmith."

"Officer, you know me, obviously, and therefore you know where I can be found. I'm rather late for an appointment because of all this. Could you handle it, do you think, and come by later for me to deal with the details?"

"Sure, after we call your friend and get authorization for a locksmith. We're going right to the courthouse, and it will only take a couple more minutes of your time to deal with this. You can call your appointment from there."

The judge's shoulders seemed to slump a little, and he stuck his hands in the pockets of his green quilted down jacket. "Of all the idiotic . . ." the judge began, as the crew members returned to the ferry. The last of the cars waiting in the parking lot pulled around Fred's car, which was also obstructing traffic, and drove over the ramp into the maw of the boat.

Fred opened the car door and reached for the cellular phone, but as he took his eyes off the judge, the man suddenly began walking briskly away from the car.

"Judge Throckmorton!" Fred hollered.

"Do it without me," the man said, and quickened his pace. Fred jogged after him. He had found long ago while working at a convenience store, when people didn't want him to check their ID, that this kind of arrogant behavior often hid fear of being caught—in the case of the irate customers, for bad checks. In the case of the judge, he didn't know for sure, but he had a good idea it involved Rose.

He caught up with the judge and grabbed his elbow. "I'm sorry, sir, but I do have to detain . . ."

The judge turned on him with a snarl, his hand whipping out of his pocket, displaying the glint of metal. Fred couldn't reach his own piece in time to keep from being blown to kingdom come.

But about that time the cat he had seen before streaked between them and clawed its way up Fred's leg as a young black man ran headlong into the judge, knocking the gun from his hand.

The judge's gun dropped and spun on the pavement, and Fred, the cat still clinging to his leg, rolled and pounced on the weapon before rising to pounce on the judge and his assailant.

"That wasn't what I'd call a great career move, Your Honor," he said to Throckmorton. "Now, then, I'm charging you with assaulting an officer with a deadly weapon for beginners. Why do I have the feeling I'll want to add a thing or two after I've checked that license number? You have the right to remain silent . . ."

"Hey, cop," Dico said. "Can I get up?"

Fred, panting and a little scraped up, covering the judge with his own gun while pulling his off-duty revolver from its holster, said, "Yeah. Thanks."

"Go find another cop, Dico. This guy's too tied up to hear about the little girl and the distress signal Felicity's been getting from Rose," the cat said in perfectly clear, if somewhat nasal, English. "And look. The big white boat's way out in the water. Now we'll never catch them."

 

* * *

 

"Guide us," Doc said, eyes closed and every pore inhaling the heat and giving forth sweat, cleansing mind and body. "Heal us, Great Spirit."

Maurice was drumming slowly and steadily as a heartbeat.

"Send us a vision," Trip-Wire said suddenly. "Something to make the nightmares go away."

"A vision," Dead-Eye repeated, feeling a little silly but trying to get the hang of this new-age stuff.

"A vision of a totem animal," Doc said.

"RRReeedeep," came the noise from the tent flap and with the next drum beat, a toad squatted among their sweating bodies.

"Rrreeeeedeep," the toad repeated, and hopped back beyond the tent flap.

"The sign has been given," Doc said."You kiddin', man? That was nothin' but a toad."

"Follow," Doc said.

They exited the tent and, to Maurice's surprise, the toad sat a little way away until he saw them, and saw that they saw him, and then hopped back toward the creek bank, periodically turning around to croak again, as if summoning them, hopping faster and faster into the clearing by the creek until Doc was the first to spot her."Jesus, it's Sno!" he told the others.

"What's wrong with her, man?"

"Convulsions or something," Dead-Eye, who was also a paramedic, said. "We gotta get her to a hospital."

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