Dangerous Calling (The Shadowminds) (3 page)

Shane followed my thoughts. “What about the phone number? Can we still trace it?”

“Pay phone. But I got something else.” I showed him the sunglasses. I’d wrapped them in a handful of fast food napkins I’d found in his glove box.

“You’re sure they’re hers?”

“Trust me, nobody else has been at that gas station for decades.” I levitated them onto the bed beside us. “Do you think a dowser could track her?”

Dowsers were unusual shadowminds—some called them seekers. They could locate a specific object or person in their range no matter how cluttered the area might be. The best of them were better than any GPS homing beacon, but they were vanishingly rare. In fact, I’d only ever met one.

“Janine could,” Shane said, and I sighed. I’d been afraid he’d say that.

I looked at the sunglasses and the hair tie. There was a lot of tangled hair on it. Surely a less talented dowser could do something with it. “Isn’t there anyone else?” I already knew the answer, but I held out hope Shane knew of someone outside the city. Hell, someone outside the state. Janine had no reason to help me. In fact, she had more than one reason to hate my guts.

“No one I know of,” he said, and I slumped back down onto his chest.

I looked at Shane’s alarm clock. As much as I wanted to fix this, there was no way Janine would help me if I showed up demanding her services two hours before dawn. “I’ll go in the morning—it’s too late now.”

“The worst she can say is no.”

I rolled off of him onto my pillow and stared at the ceiling as if it would help. “She can say a lot worse than that.”

Chapter Two

The last time I’d seen Janine Tooley, it was to tell her that her only living son had killed a dozen innocent people and murdered his own father. Then I’d thrown him in a secret supernatural prison and refused to tell her where. Saying she didn’t want to see me was an understatement.

Ryan Tooley had been a friend. We’d grown up together, learning to handle our abilities. Neither of us had known it back then, but Ryan and I could both pull. The difference was, Ryan hadn’t learned how to control himself. He used his gift to work fake miracles for a front man at a small-town church, killing off a bunch of “expendable” people to power the show. Shane and I found out about it, but we’d been too late to bring him out of the pit he’d dug for himself. We’d just been lucky my powers were a match for his.

As we drove up to her pretty brick townhouse in Lakeview, I was glad we’d spared Janine most of the details, and that she wasn’t a strong enough telepath to hunt through those memories. It was better for all of us if I kept them hidden.

Shane parked in the street outside Janine’s house, and the familiarity of it—the number of times we’d done this to come to football parties and barbecues—filled me with regret. She’d redone the landscaping and put a fresh coat of paint on the shutters—it looked better than I’d ever seen it. There was even a bright blue welcome sign hanging on the door. It was decorated with tiny hearts. Not what I’d always thought of as her style.

We hadn’t spoken with Janine in months. She’d steadily ignored my phone calls, and eventually, the number had come up as disconnected. I assumed she’d changed it. Hopefully, by now, she’d be willing to talk to us again.

“Should we just go up and knock?” I was still a little afraid she’d slam the door in our faces.

“Would you rather lurk in the street until she comes out?” Shane gave me a small smile and turned off the ignition. “Come on.”

We walked up the brick path together, and I knocked on the door. A moment later, a statuesque brunette with a friendly smile opened it. I didn’t recognize her.

“Oh! Hello. Can I help you?”
—never seen them before—did they just move in
,
too?—seem like a nice young couple—

“Uh...” Shane and I looked at each other. “We’re looking for Janine Tooley,” he said. “Is she—”

“Janine Tooley?” She was puzzled. “Oh! That’s the lady who owned this place before. Matt and I bought it months ago.” Her face fell a little, as though she was responsible for disappointing us. “Are you friends of hers?”

I stared at the flourishing caladiums in the raised beds along the outer wall. I should’ve known. I should’ve known the moment we drove up.

“Is everything all right?” the woman asked. I focused on her face again. She radiated genuine concern.

“Sorry to disturb you,” Shane said, and he took me by the elbow and steered me back to the car before the woman could voice her intention to ask us in for coffee.

I sat in the passenger seat and stared at the caladiums. “I guess I can see why she sold it.” Janine had raised her family in that house, spent decades with her now-dead husband. My throat tightened. “What now?”

Shane was staring at the house, too, his emotions a mirror of my own. “I’ll see if she’s listed,” he said after a moment, and took out his phone.

The curtains in the front window twitched aside, and I caught a glimpse of the woman who’d answered the door. “We should probably leave before she thinks we’re casing her house.”

“Found her.” He started the car.

“Where?”

“Not here.”

* * *

That turned out to be an understatement.

The complex housing Janine’s new apartment was a cinderblock cube with undersized plate-glass windows and rust on the stair railings. In the concrete parking lot outside I recognized her old sedan. The doors had new dents in them.

I picked up the sunglasses and the hair tie, now protected in a plastic sandwich bag, and we headed up the exterior metal stairs. Janine was on the second floor, and we knocked on the light-blue door of number 292. At first I was afraid she wouldn’t answer, but after a moment, shuffling sounds within were followed by a heavy scraping noise and a muffled curse.

Janine opened the door a crack, the security chain still locked. I could only see a narrow window of her face, one red-rimmed, green eye and a swath of skin gone pale and slack. Her eyes narrowed when she saw us, and her lips thinned. For a moment, I thought she might slam the door in our faces.

“Well, shit.” She unlocked the security chain. “I guess I can’t keep you out.”

She opened the door wide, and we stepped inside.

The place smelled like a roadside diner, and not the cheerful kind. Grease, dust and stale air. The room had thinning tan carpet, white walls with a blue wallpaper border featuring pink roses, a small window covered by bent mini blinds. The kitchen was open to the living room, but it didn’t look as though anyone had cooked there in a while. Cereal boxes and fast-food cartons lined the counters, and the sink was stacked with dirty bowls.

Janine made a vague gesture, and Shane and I sat on the couch. More accurately, we sat on the stacks of old grocery store coupon books and piles of laundry that covered the couch. There was a coffee table somewhere in the middle of the room, but it was hidden beneath more coupon flyers, greasy fried chicken buckets, at least five remote controls and, improbably, a bunch of fat red candles with pristine wicks. Janine didn’t bother offering us anything. She shifted a collection of plastic shopping bags off an easy chair and sat in it.

She’d changed. She’d once been generously curvy, but the baggy, shapeless clothes she was wearing made her look deflated. Her hair was flat and looked as if it hadn’t been washed in a week, and her teeth were stained around the edges. She had on fuzzy pink slippers so worn that the nap was matted down into something like felt.

She pulled out a cigarette. “You’re looking good, Cassie.” She turned to Shane. “How’s your uncle?” She lit the cigarette and picked up a dirty ashtray from the table next to her chair.

“A little under the weather.”

“Huh. Well. That’s a shame.” She puffed on the cigarette. Shane and I exchanged a look.

“Janine,” Shane said, “we need your help.”

“Didn’t think you were coming by to be neighborly.” She didn’t ask us to elaborate. An old tube television was on mute in the background. On-screen, a pretty brunette modeled an electric blue tracksuit. I remembered the last time I’d seen Janine in her Lakeview house, Mac at the kitchen table reading the sports section, her at the stove, stirring a roux, wearing an old Central Grocery apron cinched around her waist. It seemed like something I’d imagined.

“We need to find someone.”

“I don’t do that anymore.” She stared at the silent television. The blue tracksuit brunette had been joined by a blonde in bright lime green. Janine tapped ash into the tray. “Even if I did, why would I do it for you?”

Well, I hadn’t expected this to go smoothly.

“
At least she’s not yelling
,” Shane said, mindspeaking on a tight line, his voice clear but quiet in my head.

“
That might’ve been easier.
”

Shane leaned on his knees, trying to get into Janine’s line of sight. “We can help you,” he said. When she didn’t respond, he added, “What do you need?” He would’ve asked even if we didn’t need her help.

I expected her to ask for money. I couldn’t imagine she didn’t need it. She tapped her cigarette again, and instead of turning to Shane, she leveled her gaze on me. Her answer took me by surprise, but I should’ve been expecting it. “I want to see my boy.”

“Ryan?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Who else would I mean? Robert’s dead and buried, isn’t he? Unless you killed Ryan, too?”

“Ryan is alive.” I’d gone through a lot to make that happen. After everything he’d done, it would’ve been easier—safer, simpler—to kill him. Someone else might’ve done it. But Janine was a friend. And I wasn’t a killer. “I can take you to him.”

She nodded slowly, puffing on her cigarette. “I’ll help you, then. But I’m not doing anything until I see my boy.”

* * *

“Well, that could’ve gone better.” Shane opened the passenger door for me and I got in.

“No kidding.”

“You think she’ll go for it?” He didn’t mean Janine.

“One way to find out.” I took out my phone and dialed Susannah.

I didn’t know her last name. She was programmed into my phone as Susannah Biloxi. She was the winged guardian of the city, and the only creature within two hundred miles strong enough to handle a converter like Ryan. As far as I knew, his powers would never return, but we couldn’t risk having him in a normal prison if they did, so Susannah was holding him. For a price.

The phone rang a dozen times before it went to voice mail. I got an automated message announcing that the person I dialed was not available. It was hard to tell if the number was wrong, or Susannah just hadn’t bothered to personalize her greeting. I was betting on the latter.

“Nothing,” I said. I called the grill Susannah owned and got a perky employee who assured me she’d pass along my message. I wasn’t reassured. “We should just go. Just get in the car and start driving.” Diana could be anywhere. She could be dead. We couldn’t afford delays.

“And when we show up unannounced—what then?”

I started to protest, but he was right. The last time I’d shown up in Susannah’s city without calling first, she hadn’t exactly been pleased. I stared at my phone and willed it to ring.

“I don’t think that’s going to work,” Shane said, and I glared at him.

“Just take me to the B&B. At least I can be useful while I wait.”

Shane drove me to the Quarter and pulled over alongside his uncle Lionel’s B&B. Since I hadn’t found a job at any of the New Orleans engineering firms yet, I was helping Lionel keep the place up, cleaning rooms and washing dishes. The work wasn’t glamorous, but it was surprisingly satisfying. Besides, it was hard not to love the B&B, a classic old French Quarter home, brick and stucco painted orange-red, wrought iron balconies and window boxes. Now, in the height of summer, they were overflowing with white jasmine and violet-blue lobelia.

“You going to the shop?” I asked Shane. Charlie was a good boss—he never minded when Shane needed time off—but he still paid by the hour. I wasn’t exactly raking in the money, either. If we wanted to make the mortgage, we had to work.

Shane nodded. “I can get a little work done on this import someone brought in last week. Fender bender.”

“Should I tell him?” I looked toward the B&B. Shane knew what I meant.

Lionel and Janine had been close. They’d known each other most of their lives, and before everything that had happened, they’d been the core of the New Orleans shadowmind community. Lionel had been the last to believe Ryan was guilty, and if he truly knew how far Janine had fallen, he would be heartbroken.

Shane shook his head, and concern for his uncle washed through him. “He doesn’t need to know.”

“That’s what I think too.”

“All right.” He leaned in and gave me a swift kiss on the lips and a lingering mental squeeze at my waist. “Let me know what Susannah says.”

“If she ever calls back,” I said, and got out of the car.

I walked into the house through the formal foyer. It was almost lunchtime, and the guests’ dining room was empty. It looked as though I’d just missed breakfast.

I went through to the kitchen and found Lionel and his partner Bruce both at the sink, washing dishes. They hadn’t noticed me yet. I stood in the doorway, governing my thoughts and shoving the memory of the morning deep in my head. Bruce was a normal, but Lionel was a converter, and he’d practically raised me. There was no way to keep him from noticing that something was bothering me, but I could at least keep him from finding out what.

Bruce said something to Lionel, but I couldn’t make it out. Lionel made a mock-outraged noise and hit him with a damp dishtowel, and Bruce laughed and pulled him close and kissed him. Decades together and they still acted like a couple of kids flirting on a first date. I cleared my throat.

“Cassie!” Lionel blushed deep red over his dark brown skin. “Didn’t see you there, sugar.”

I laughed. “Yeah, I figured.” I walked into the room and stood on tiptoe to give Bruce a peck on the cheek. He chuckled, looking like a redheaded Cajun Santa Claus.

“Hey there,
chère.
We were worried about you.”

I usually got in much earlier to help serve breakfast. I kept my thoughts locked down. “Just had something to take care of. I’ll go get started on the rooms?”

“Sure, sugar. Most of the guests are out.”

I raced up the stairs before he could figure out I had shields up and checked my phone. Nothing.

I blared music on my headphones to distract myself while I waited. I made up the bed and scrubbed the bathroom in the Wisteria Room, then moved on to the Rose Room on the third floor. The couple staying in it had used all of the complimentary toiletries. Again. I replaced them and checked my phone to make sure I hadn’t somehow missed Susannah’s call while I’d been making up the bed. Still nothing.

I moved on to the Blue Room, which looked like it had been ground zero of a frat party. Beer cans, stray Mardi Gras beads, a bra. I knew for a fact no women had checked in. It was a nice bra. I hoped the owner got it back eventually. I sighed and headed for the bathroom, and of course, Susannah finally called back while I was in the middle of scrubbing the toilet.

“What is it?” She didn’t even wait for me to say hello.

“I need to visit your prison.”

“That wasn’t part of our agreement.”

I’d been afraid of this. “You never said I couldn’t visit. I need to make sure he’s all right.”

“I assure you he is in satisfactory condition.”

“I need to see him.”

She was quiet for a moment. “Fine.” I held in my breath of relief so she wouldn’t hear it. “When?”

“As soon as possible. This afternoon.”

She mumbled something that was probably unpleasant, but we settled on a time. I hadn’t discussed it with Janine, but from what I’d seen that morning, I was betting her schedule was open.