Chill Factor (Weather Warden #3)

"What the hell-" I began, but he held out both hands, palm out, to stop me.

"I can explain. Everything. Just... don't do that again, okay?" He looked genuinely spooked. "We can't stay here. Get in the car. Please. Hurry!"

"Why was I in the trunk?"

"It was the only way I could get you out of there without..." He darted anxious looks at the empty horizon, the blank shimmering road. "Just get in the car, okay? Please?"

"I saw him kill that woman." I don't know why I said it; it was almost as if the words were under pressure; I couldn't keep them in. I had to get rid of that moment, that image, that horrible silent pantomime of death. "He stabbed her in the back."

Chaz's face went even whiter, if that was possible, and his eyes had a blank, haunted look. He grabbed my arm, moved me aside, and slammed the trunk. Hustled me around to the passenger side of the car, which I now saw was his roadmonster of a Seville, maroon, with pimp-gold trim and wheels. I wasn't shocked to find he'd gone with the expensive Italian leather interior. It felt cold and stiff against me as I edged inside. Chaz ran around the long hood and piled into the driver's seat, put the car in gear, and scratched gravel out onto the road again.

When the speedometer was pegged at eighty, he pulled a deep breath and said, "Look, you have a nasty bump on the head; maybe you imagined-"

"Bullshit."

"Hey, give me a chance here, honey-"

I held out a shaking finger at him. "Not your honey, and the next time you give me some name like baby or sweetheart I'm going to kick your ass so hard you can read your underwear label. Got me?"

He was silent. Typed a message on the steering wheel in urgent Morse code. Finally nodded.

"Who was he?" I asked.

"I don't know."

"I hate to repeat myself, but ass? Underwear label? I know you were manipulating the weather out there to drive off aerial surveillance. Drugs, right? He was making some kind of drug deal."

"I don't know!"

"You get paid. You have to know his name."

He looked really ill now. "Look, I just know him as Orry, okay? Orry."

"Know him how?"

"Business."

"And again, see previous threat."

"No, I'm serious, we have a business arrangement," he said. "I didn't know he was... you know."

"Killing unarmed women?" I felt sick to my stomach, but damned if I'd throw up in front of Chaz. "What kind of business arrangement?"

"He pays me to keep the weather clear for his couriers, and knock police planes off course. You know, the surveillance planes, like you said. That's-"

I interpreted. "He pays you to facilitate trafficking." Which explained Chaz's unusual weather patterns out here in the barrens. He'd been manipulating systems to create clear paths for the planes coming in, and storm fronts to frustrate the cops. "Jesus, Chaz." I rubbed my aching head. "You had to know you'd get caught."

He got a crafty look. Great. Chaz, who was monumentally stupid, actually thought he was clever. "Well, I'm not the only one, you know. Everybody gets a little something on the side. It's how the Wardens work."

I stared at him, lips parted. Amazed. "What?"

"Oh, come on, drop the innocent act. Look, I agree, Orry's out of control-Jesus, I freaked when I saw what he'd done to that poor girl. The only thing I could do was get you out of there. He was going to kill you!"

"So you saved me by knocking me out and sticking me in the trunk of the car." Which made me wonder how the hell he'd gotten a maroon pimp-trimmed Seville all the way out into the desert like that, without having it become a permanent desert monument. It wasn't exactly an SUV. In fact, there was no way he'd driven this car all the way out there.

But there had been a dun-brown Jeep parked near the arroyo, which would have nicely done the job of carting my unconscious body back to the roadside.

It belonged to the killer. Orry.

I turned my face away from Chaz, afraid what it might say.

"How'd you get me back to the car?" I asked.

"What?"

"Did you drag me? We were a long way out in the desert. That's a hell of a distance to carry me."

"Well, I couldn't leave you out there." He tried to sound altruistic. It came off as ridiculous. "Let it go, Joanne. Look, I have money. Lots of it. Just give me a bank account number and you're an instant millionaire, I swear. All you have to do is turn in a good report to the Wardens and take the money, right? It's what all the others did." The three previous audits. He'd greased the wheels. Of course. No wonder the audits had smelled funny.

"Did the others see a woman get killed?" Her hands, scrabbling at the dirt, fumbling for rescue. "What'd she do, Chaz? Shortchange the shipment? Blackmail him?"

He sighed. "You're not going to take the money."

It would be smart to tell him I would, but I wasn't in the mood to lie. "No."

"I knew. I knew the minute I saw you. You know what you look like in Oversight? Goddamn Saint Joan the martyr. You burn real bright, Joanne, but you're burning yourself right up." Chaz shook his head. "It's the way things work. You take the money and you shut the hell up. Look, you do good things, right? We all do. We save people. Why shouldn't we make a little-"

"She's dead!" I shouted, and was a little shocked at the raw edge of fury in my voice. "And you're finished. Understand? This is over. Over. Nobody else dies."

Chaz sent me a pitying look. He reached down, picked up a cell phone that lay on the seat between us, and dialed a number. "Yeah, I'm on I-Seventy, coming up on the caves. Be there in a couple of minutes."

Guess I was wrong about the cell coverage, I thought stupidly. He hung up. I stared at him, at his neat preppy outfit, his perfect tan, his expensive manicure.

"You knocked me out," I said. "He drove me back to your car. Why didn't you just leave me there? The two of you already killed one woman; why not two?"

"Look, you don't have the slightest idea of what's going on," he said. "I can't just kill you. If you disappear, I'm going to have to answer questions. Just... just take the money, okay? Take it and go. You weren't supposed to come out here in the first place; you were supposed to stay in Las Vegas."

"This was where the trouble was."

"And you go looking for trouble. Great. Out of all the Wardens, I have to get the Lone Ranger."

Unfortunately, I was terminally short a Tonto. We passed a flashing blur of a road sign that read CARLSON CAVES, 1 MILE. So I had about forty seconds to figure out what to do. The problem was that I was wounded, weak from blood loss, and I was facing another Weather Warden, which was the worst possible matchup. We could hurt each other, all right, but we'd hurt everybody else a hell of a lot worse. At least neither of us had a Djinn-that made it a little less destructive.

I eyed the cell phone. If I could call for help... No, they couldn't get here in time. Well, if I called John Foster, he could task his Djinn to get me out of here; that was something...

I made my decision, and grabbed for it. Chaz jerked the wheel sharply to the left, tossing me against the passenger door; the phone clattered noisily against window glass and slid into the dim recesses of the backseat. Fuck. I was committed. Too late for caution now...

I called wind.

So did Chaz.

The car spun out, slammed from two different directions by fifty-mile-per-hour gusts. It skidded weightlessly, grabbed gravel, and tilted, and I nearly lost control of the freight-train blast of the jet stream I'd redirected. Airborne rocks pelted glass with snare-drum impacts, and something heavier hit and shuddered the frame. The glass on my side spider webbed. I pushed harder, because Chaz was reaching over to grab me, and the Seville tilted up on its side, groaned like a living thing, and rolled.

The window shattered and fell away as gravity writhed, and I yelped and hit the car again with a roar of wind, rolling it again back over on its tires. I squirmed out the broken window and ignored the hot drag of glass splinters against my skin, slithered out, and fell onto hot sand. The Seville was still moving, blasted by the jet stream, and I cowered as it was pushed over me. I hit it again with a gust, this one more than a hundred miles an hour, and it flipped up in the air and spun like I'd shot it out of a cannon. It traveled about twenty-five feet before slamming back down on its tires on top of a saguaro cactus.

I killed the wind and realized that something had happened to me. A numb feeling in my leg. I twisted around and looked, and saw a piece of shiny metal embedded in the back of my thigh, big as a flatiron, sharp as a knife. I went light-headed and gray, looked away and breathed deep.

That was when I realized that it wasn't over.

Out in the distance, something terrible was happening. A growing roar of power, thundering out of control; he'd done this, or I had, or both of us had sparked it like a match in a powder keg. I reached for the wind but couldn't grab it; it was slick as glass, moving too fast, too full of its own fury.

A smear on the horizon.

An ominous layer of haze.

A wave of brown, turning black. Breaking like surf. Birds were flying frantically south ahead of it, but I could see the wave overtaking them. I'd heard stories of black rollers from the dust bowl, but I'd never actually seen one; it was terrifying, awesome, uncontrollable. A sea of darkness blotting out the sun as it came, a horizontal tornado of lethal force. It was picking up everything in its path-cactus, tumbleweeds, fences, barbed wire, the shredded remains of animals unfortunate enough to be caught in its path.

Coming right at me.

I screamed and tried to grab for it again, but it was too much, too big; it would take a vast power sourced in Djinn to handle this thing.

Think. No time to run; it was almost on me. If I stayed where I was, it would strip the flesh off my bones, scour me dead. The wind wall inside the thing had to be upward of 150 miles per hour, maybe higher.

I did the only thing I could think of. I created a cushion of hardened air over me, locked the molecules tightly together, sealed myself in a bubble, and prayed.

The black roller roared across asphalt. I watched it strip a Joshua tree out of the earth, shred it into toothpicks, and fling it up into the impenetrable darkness. Lightning flared blue inside the darkness, static electricity flaring off of every surface capable of carrying a charge, crawling eerily on the breaking edge of the wave, flaring in hot blue lines along the telephone wires. A frantically flapping hawk disappeared in an explosion of shredded feathers.

I watched the sun disappear behind that black storm front, and closed my eyes.

Sound came distantly. Inside my hardened bubble it was one long, inhuman scream, like metal being tortured. I was afraid to open my eyes, but I knew the sand around me was gone, scoured down to hard-packed earth, eroded in patches down to bedrock. Dear God, please.. .

I felt a sting of hot sand spurt against my face. Static electricity zapped at me, burning; I smelled the hot snap of it everywhere around me. I struggled to hold on to the matrix protecting me, but the howling monster outside was so strong, so incredibly strong... I couldn't hold it. Couldn't... the pressure of the black roller was breaking down the bubble of air that was all that stood between me and being flayed alive.

I curled up tight, gasping in stale breaths, resisting the urge to add my scream to that of the insane wind out there. When I risked a look, I saw a black snake of razor wire flailing over me, held back from my skin by millimeters.

Another white-hot burst of sand broke through the shield, this one near my knees. I struggled to seal it, but the air was coming loose from its matrix, molecules spinning out of control; there were fiery strikes everywhere now, burning...

And then the shield weakened, and I was on fire.

It lasted for only a few seconds, but the pain was intense, disorienting. I couldn't breathe. Instinct wouldn't let me open my mouth or eyes. Sand quickly buried me, which in a sense was a blessing against the already abraded mess of my skin.

The pressure of wind against me slowed to a bully's shove, then gusts, then a breeze.

Then silence.

The black roller had moved on.

My lungs were aching. I clawed sand away, convulsed my way up to a sitting position, and sucked in a hazy, dry breath. Coughed and tasted ozone.

It was unnaturally still. Nothing but a low-hanging blur of dust so fine it barely qualified as talcum powder, and a landscape scoured clean of everything taller than the asphalt road, which had been worn down in spots to thin gray gravel.

I rolled over, took hold of the metal spike in my leg, and yanked it free. The world wobbled and went dark, and I saw stars, felt the hot spurt of blood, and fumbled my shirt off to tie it hard against my thigh. I managed to get to my feet and limped slowly into the devastation, looking for the Seville.

I didn't recognize it at first. It had the ancient look of something that had been left out here for years, scrubbed down to base metal; the tires were shredded into thin black fibers. The hood was gone, along with the doors and the trunk lid. The leather interior was a tattered, sand-heaped mess.

No sign of Chaz. I limped around the far side and spotted a heap of rags on the other side.

He'd crawled out and tried to take shelter against the back right tire; it had been the only real cover available, but it hadn't helped. He hadn't made a shell the way I had, or if he had, it hadn't worked long enough.

He was missing his skin.

His body was a glistening red-black mess with white bone showing in places.

I sank down on my knees and wished I could cry, but there was nothing left. Nothing but fear.