Talent to Burn (Hidden Talent #1) (6 page)

“Sure,” I said, not sure at all. My feet were killing me and I carried a thin layer of grime from the desert heat. A bath and about ten hours sleep would probably fix it. Dinner was optional. But we had to get to the motel.

Jamie stopped, and looked at me. “You’re really tired, huh?”

I nodded.

“Okay. Let’s eat, and then we can work out what to do from here.”

Tired as I was, I barely caught the sag of his shoulders. I sighed. I wasn’t going to rain on his parade when he was working for my brother’s benefit. “No, let’s go to the motel.”

“Are you sure?” His eyes lit up.

“Yeah, it’s fine. But after that I might sleep for about a hundred years.”

“Thanks, Cat. I’ve got the itch that says we’re getting closer.” I could see it for myself—he could barely stand still. His hand in his pocket gave him away, jangling his keys, while one foot drummed a rhythm on the ground. “I really feel like we should go now.”

“This is what it’s like to be a Finder?” I started walking out to the parking lot and he fell into step beside me.

“Yep. Sometimes it’s like this, an itch that gets worse and worse, like I’ve got insects all over my body. Other times I can almost see the path to follow, it’s so clear, like the yellow brick road. And sometimes it’s like a voice in my head saying, ‘Go. Look there.’ It’s always pulling me along. Sometimes I don’t even know what I’m looking for.”

His strides were getting bigger and bigger. I could barely keep up.

“And right now, it’s urgent?”

He scratched irritably at his sprouting two-day growth. “Yes, and getting more so. Let’s hurry.”

The Tropic of Capricorn was your standard sixties-built, beige concrete motel, palm trees out front, and a large sign proclaiming, “ESPN is now free!” It actually looked slightly nicer than I had expected, but the working girls loitering around the corner told a different tale.

We parked and headed into the office, passing a girl in a sun hat and her beefy john on their way out. Or maybe he was her pimp. The guy was huge, looked like some kind of Pacific Islander. No telling where muscle ended and fat began, all squeezed into a wife beater. I tried not to stare at him as we passed. I didn’t want him staring at me, that was for sure.

Jamie stalked straight to the desk and rang the bell. The clerk sauntered out of the back room. He wore a little goatee and a T-shirt that read, “I listen to bands that haven’t been invented yet”.

I figured it was my turn to talk. “Hi, I’m Eric Wilson’s sister. We’re trying to find him and I hoped you could help us.”

The dude stroked his beard. “I think you missed the boat.”

“What?”

“His girl checked them out of the room a couple minutes ago.”

I struggled to make sense of his words.

“What girl?” said Jamie urgently, matching my thoughts.

“Little redhead, with a big ole scary dude.”

Shit. The girl from the bar. So where was Eric?

Jamie swore and bolted from the office. I followed behind and caught him at curbside, looking both ways up and down the street. The odd couple appeared long gone.

“I didn’t even look at the girl,” he said. “And now we’re not close anymore. The itch is gone. I can’t believe she walked right by us.”

I had little to offer. “I didn’t even notice if she had an aura. We may as well go back inside and talk to the clerk.”

We went back to the hipster behind the desk. A brief interrogation and a hundred bucks later, we knew little more, except that the girl’s tattoo was of a phoenix, and that she’d paid cash. The clerk had made a living out of not noticing what went on in the motel. He had agreed to let us look around inside the room for an extra fifty.

The motel was U-shaped, with a pool inside the U. Eric’s room was in one of the back corners, in a closed hallway without a pool view. We let ourselves in through the chipped door and I surveyed the room. Typical cheap motel: pink and green curtains, bedcovers from the eighties, dark carpet. One of the two beds sported rumpled, unmade sheets, but no luggage sat on the little stand. They hadn’t left a tip for the maid.

Jamie headed straight to the wastebasket. I sat down on the unused bed, exhaustion weighing me down more and more by the minute. We’d raced here for nothing. They were gone.

“It’s full of empty packets from a first aid kit,” he said after a moment. “Gauze, tape—I guess he was injured after all.”

“I wonder where he is now,” I said, my voice sounding a long way away. Jamie headed into the bathroom, and I laid my head down for a second. Something tugged at my senses, but I couldn’t identify it.

“Jamie,” I said slowly, “What’s that smell?”

He stuck his head back out and breathed in. “I don’t know—kerosene maybe? Something oily, but not gasoline. It’s not strong.”

“Do you think it’s left over from the fire?” My brain moved slowly through the facts.

“You think that could be why it got out of hand?” He paused, looking up, thinking. “Seems like a good possibility. I didn’t understand why or how Eric would burn himself, but an accelerant being involved makes more sense.”

Jamie came out of the bathroom and shook out the bedcovers on the unmade bed, wafting stale air over me. There was a chink of something hitting the floor, and he muttered, “Score,” under his breath, scooping up something shiny.

“What is it?” I said, sitting up again in a Herculean effort.

He held the object up and I could see it was a small gold medal on a chain. “I assumed it was a Saint Christopher medal. But it says Jude.”

“Saint Jude? I thought he was a traitor.”

“Jude, not Judas. Patron saint of hopeless cases.” Jamie snapped the medal into his hand, grinned at me. “Former altar boy, me.”

Now that was hard to imagine. I shrugged. “I don’t know much about saints, but I don’t see how it helps.”

“I know people who might be able to read this.”

I looked up, confused. “We already read what’s on it.”
Oh.
“You mean Talents?”

“Technically, psychometrists.” Jamie pulled out a crisp white pocket-handkerchief and wrapped the medal in it. He caught me giving him a look. “What?”

“Nothing.” I was surprised this big guy with the leather pants and tattoos carried a white pocket-handkerchief. If it had been a red bandana, I wouldn’t have blinked.

I lay back on the bed, unable to stay upright any longer, and stared into space. My gaze traveled over the bedside table and the old brown phone, and then came to a halt. From where I lay on the flat motel pillow, I could see something under the phone. Reaching out, I shifted the phone and pulled out a business card.

“Jamie,” I said, “I may not be a Finder, but I think this might be more useful than the medal.”

He came over to look. “Renee’s Tattoos,” he read. “And our mystery girl has a big one. Perhaps there’s some relationship.”

“If we’re lucky, this card hasn’t been sitting here for the last six months. I suspect the maid doesn’t clean under the phone particularly often.”

“I have a feeling both of the things we found will help us.”

“You’re the Finder,” I said, trying not to sound too grumpy. “Are we done here?”

“I think so.” Jamie walked over to the door and reached out to the handle, then snatched his hand back. “It’s hot.”

I sat up fast. “Don’t open it.”

He looked through the peephole as I spoke. “The hallway is on fire. We can’t get out this way.”

Fear struck through me like lightning. Adrenaline had me on my feet and halfway to the door before he’d finished speaking. “Is that why we smelled kerosene? Someone starting a fire?”

“I don’t know, but I do know we should get out of here, now.” Jamie strode over to the window. “This doesn’t open.”

Terror reached out, grabbed my heart, and squeezed. “We’re screwed.”

Chapter Seven

I couldn’t believe this. Putting my hands over my eyes to hold back the tears, I wished I knew how to pray. My adolescence hadn’t exactly included a lot of community activities like going to church.

A loud crash broke into my fatalistic thoughts, and I jumped, dropping my hands to see Jamie throw aside the chair he’d used to smash the window.

“You’re bleeding,” I said.

“Better than cooked,” he replied, clearing the glass from the lower sill with his elbow. Turning, he grabbed the cheap bedspread and laid it down it over the remaining shards.

“We’re on the second floor.” I hurried over to look out. The parking lot lay below, seemingly miles away and made of hard, white concrete.

“It’s not far.” Jamie climbed over the sill and lowered himself with bleeding hands, then dropped the remaining distance to the ground. He landed in a crouch, steadied, then stood up and opened his arms. “Come on,” he said, “I’ll catch you.”

Between a rock and a hard place, to use a cliché, I drew a deep breath and put my leg over the sill. I lowered myself as carefully as I could, each movement bringing me closer to a fall. Moments later I hung by my fingertips, not trusting the ground below.

“Come on,” Jamie said again, urgently. “I don’t know who started this, and I don’t know if they’re coming back. Don’t look down. Let go.”

Shutting my eyes, I let go of the windowsill and trusted him. He caught me against his chest, rough, my back against him, his arms closing around me. His scent filled my nostrils—leather, spice and fresh sweat. I inhaled deeply, wanting to draw it into my memory for later, and then opened my eyes. There wasn’t time for this right now. “I’m okay. Let’s go.”

We scrambled into the car, and Jamie took off with a squeal of rubber.

“Careful,” I said, “you don’t want to draw police attention. They might think we started it.”

“Now that brings up an interesting topic.” He turned onto the highway and we blended into the traffic, one anonymous beige rental among thousands. “Not how the fire started—I have a fair idea of that—or who started it. But why it was started, now that’s an interesting question.”

“You think tattoo girl was trying to kill us? But why?”

“That’s one possibility, although scaring us off seems more likely.” Jamie shoved his fingers through his dark hair, mussing it further, if that were possible. “Another is that they were trying to dispose of evidence. Yet another is that they wanted to make it look as though Eric torched the place.”

I started. “But why?” His brain worked in some twisted ways.

“Too many whys, Cat, too many whys.”

The concrete barriers flew past the window as I slumped lower in my seat, trying to hide from the glare of the desert light that made my head hurt. All I wanted was to sleep.

“Let’s find somewhere to hole up and think,” Jamie said.

And sleep, and shower, and eat. I thought longingly of the cheap motel bed. Any bed at all would do. “Good idea,” I said.

I glanced over at Jamie. He’d smeared blood—now dried—on the steering wheel, and on his face. He hadn’t said a single word about it. “Your hands,” I said.

“Ah, it’s nothing. Paper cuts,” he said, watching the road.

I closed my mouth over my retort, figuring it wasn’t going to buy me anything while he had his tough-guy face on.

Our eventual destination surprised me, as we pulled into Samurai, one of the newest casino hotels. Definitely a step up from Eric’s hotel.

“When in Rome,” Jamie said, handing the rental’s keys to the valet.

“Rome? More like Tokyo,” I murmured as we made our way into the lobby. I’d never seen anything like it in real life, only in the movies. The reception area was decorated with round white stones lining the floor, a carefully arranged stream winding through, and dark wood shaped into Asian archways leading to different parts of the resort. I hoped they had beds in this place, somewhere.

Jamie took care of checking in and then we sought out our room. The maze-like areas of the casino floor teemed with people. The reception desk had given us a map to find our way to the elevator bank for our tower, but I had trouble following it.

Every step I took got smaller and harder, and it seemed like an eternity until we finally found our elevator, and another eternity walking down the endless corridor to our door.

Inside the room at last, I stopped, as tired as I was, to take it all in. The bed crouched low to the ground. The whole room shone with black and red lacquer, the walls filled with Asian art, elegant and beautiful. I focused on the bed. My feet walked to it of their own accord, and I lay down and passed out.

The sound of the door slamming shut woke me and I sat up, not knowing where I was or what was going on.

“Hi, sleepy,” Jamie said, dropping a handful of shopping bags to the hardwood floor. They landed with a soft rustle of plastic.

“How long was I out for?” I had no sense of the time of day. A week could have passed, or a hundred years.

Jamie checked his watch. “A couple hours. I took a shower and went out to get you a few things. You didn’t start this trip with a lot of luggage.”

I looked down at myself, still wearing the green T-shirt, worn jeans and faded black denim jacket I’d left work in yesterday, and couldn’t believe only a day had passed since this whole thing began. “Thanks. I need a shower,” I said. “I probably smell bad.”