by Hondo Jinx
“Just don’t go acting like some kind of nut again, like you did at Mallory Square, okay?” She mimicked him, bugging out her pretty eyes and waving her arms crazily.
“Blow me,” he said.
“Gladly,” Nina said. “But first you have to practice.”
She explained how to locate his power. First, he needed to still his mind. Then he had to wait. Eventually, he would feel a light tickle in his mind.
“Then what?” he asked.
“One step at a time, cowboy,” she said. “I’ll be shocked if you can find it today or even this week. It usually takes a while. Weeks, usually. Months, sometimes. But you have to start somewhere.”
“If it’s so hard to do, how come I was able to save the cat?”
“Because you needed to. It was a primal moment, do or die. That happens a lot with first timers. Some primal emotion—anger, desperation, fear—will pop their cherry. Next thing you know, a ninety-eight-pound weakling is lifting a car off her kid brother.”
“All right. Let me take a shot at this.” He shut his eyes and tried to clear his mind.
“You don’t have to shut your eyes,” Nina said.
“Hush, woman. I’m trying to concentrate.”
“You look like you have to fart,” she laughed.
“There it is,” he said.
“What, the tickle?”
He nodded.
“Bullshit,” she said.
“But it’s not really a tickle,” he said, considering the weird sensation in his mind. “It’s stronger than a tickle. And warm. Like a burning flame, only without the light.”
“Holy shit,” Nina said. “You’re serious. See if you can draw it.”
He popped one eye open. “The hell does that mean, draw it?”
Nina looked excited. “Once you find your power, you have to draw it together. You can’t force it, though. You have to coax the energy. It wants to work with you. Hell, it is you. But right now the power is still deep down inside, buried alongside the inert strands that the other orders use.”
Brawley concentrated, feeling stupid. He had no idea what he was supposed to be doing. “Any tips on how to coax it? I feel about like a one-legged cat trying to bury a turd on a frozen lake.”
“Just focus on the invisible flame,” she said. “Think happy thoughts. Imagine it coming toward you.”
“Toward me? It’s already inside me.”
“Toward your consciousness, your will.”
For a moment, he focused on the sensation, which grew more powerful. After a while, he had a clearer sense of his will as an entity unto itself, one part of a larger organism. His mind, he supposed. Like all these years, his consciousness had been floating obliviously in the middle of an enormous, pitch-black cave.
He mentally beckoned the energy toward his will, but the flame merely flickered. He imagined the strand responding to him, stretching out toward his consciousness, but it still didn’t budge.
So he switched tacks.
Rather than drawing the strand toward him, he willed his consciousness forward in the void, moving closer to the power, which grew stronger as he approached. He imagined reaching out, imagined seizing hold of the power but realized the power wasn’t a single rope that he could latch onto. He had a sense of multiple lines of power wavering like kelp.
One strand was far more distinct than the others. He focused on this wavering thing, and a section of his will unparcelled itself from his consciousness and reached out like a hand to grasp the strand.
Yes.
Gripping the strand, he felt warmth and mass and a constant buzzing, as if he had seized an overloaded power cable. He tried to haul back on the strand, tried to draw it toward him the way Nina described, but the buzzing cord slipped away like a greased eel.
Several times, he tried and failed.
“More coffee?” the waitress asked.
“None for me, thanks,” Nina said.
“No thank you, ma’am,” Brawley said with a quick smile. He was impatient, wanting to rush back inside his skull. “Just the check, please.”
The waitress left, and Nina laid a hand on Brawley’s. “Take a break, babe. Tell me what’s happening in there.”
He explained what he’d been doing and how frustrated he was not to be able to draw the power. Taking the time to explain this only fueled his frustration. All he really wanted to do was go back in and try again.
Brawley believed in the power of repetition. More than believed in it. It was part of him and had been ever since he was a kid and his dad had brought home an oil drum and rigged up a bucking barrel.
Brawley rode that drum hours every day. While other kids were running off to fish or play ball, he’d sit on his barrel, rolling back and forth with one arm in the air, finding his rhythm and developing his balance.
Then he’d gotten the medicine ball. Since then, if somebody stopped to visit, they’d likely find Brawley standing on the ball. He’d stand there eating a bowl of Fruit Loops and talk to whoever had stopped.
So yeah, it was in his nature to practice a thing, and he was ready to dive back in.
But Nina was blown away. “I can’t believe you were able to do all that,” she said again. “I mean, I’ve never heard of such a thing. You moved your will toward the strand?”
He nodded. “Well, the strands. There was a bunch of them.”
Her mouth fell open. “We have to go see Sage.”
“Hold on now. I want to have another go at this.”
“Later,” she said. “Please? You have your whole life to practice. I can’t wait to see the look on Sage’s face. You have serious power. She’s gonna flip when she sees your aura. But let’s get going. I have to work later.”
“What do you do?”
She frowned. “I deliver for a Chinese restaurant.”
“Call in sick.”
She shook her head. “My boss is an asshole. He’ll fire me if I call out.”
“Quit then,” Brawley said, hating the idea of some asshole lording power over Nina.
“Quit, huh? And how am I supposed to pay the rent?”
“You don’t have to work. I got plenty of money for both of us.”
As if on cue, the waitress showed up with their check. Brawley took it and pulled out his billfold.
“I’ll pay for my pie,” Nina said.
“Forget it,” he said, laying out the bills.
“So you’re proposing what, exactly,” she asked. “That I become a kept woman?”
“Call it what you want. I’m just saying you don’t have to worry about money.”
“Bullshit,” she said, throwing bills onto the pile. “I pay my own way.”
“I respect that,” he said. “But if you get sick of working, quit, and I’ll take care of things.”
She shook her head. “I wouldn’t want to owe you.”
“You wouldn’t owe me shit. I’m not lending you money. I’m giving it to you. No strings attached. It’s just money.”
“Just money,” she snorted. She looked briefly troubled. Then she sipped her coffee and said, “Please tell me you’re not a drug dealer or something. I really can’t afford to be dating criminals.”
He laughed. “Not hardly.”
“Okay, good. So where did you come into all this moola, Mr. Moneybags? Something to do with that?” She pointed at his big gold buckle.
Brawley nodded. “I won two million dollars riding bulls.”
She choked on her coffee. “Get the fuck out of here.”
“Two-and-a-half, if you count endorsements. I had offers for a while, but my agent held out until I won the title last year, figuring I’d get bigger deals. Trouble is, after I won the title last year, I only got the signing bonus and two royalty payments before I broke my neck. And that was all she wrote. No more bull riding, no more endorsements.”
Nina put her hand on his. “I’m sorry, Brawley. Do you miss it?”
He laughed bitterly. “I do. Don’t ask me why I’d
miss running all over the country and getting stomped, but I really do.”
They sat quietly for a while, sipping their coffee.
Then Brawley said, “The way they pay out the championship, you get ten percent per year, minus taxes and agent’s commission. Then you got your insurance payments. This year, I threw most of my dough in the bank. But last year, I blew through the money. Helped my parents out a little, bought an RV.”
She grinned like he’d cracked a joke. “An RV? One of those big camper things?”
“That’s right. You are sitting across from a bona fide Winnebago warrior.”
She laughed. “You certainly are a character.”
“So says the girl with purple hair.”
“Pfft. What kind of lunatic drives a camper around?”
“A six-foot-two lunatic tired of cramming into a truck with three or four other cowboys and smelling farts for a thousand miles at a stretch. Besides, you take one look at my RV, you’ll stop talking all that shit.”
Her smile got bigger. “Wait, it’s not back in Texas? You drove it here?”
“It’s parked across the island by the grocery store. You treat me right, I’ll give you the grand tour later.”
“The grand tour of your RV, huh? Brawley Hayes, are you trying to seduce me?”
“You know it, girl.”
She laughed. “Well, in that case, I accept. But later. I’m dying to hear what Sage has to say about your aura.”
“All right. But first I have to swing by my hotel. Checkout’s at eleven. You going to invite me to crash at your place or what?”
7
As they were crossing town, a rough-looking homeless woman pushing a shopping cart stopped and stared at Brawley, mumbling gibberish.
“I think she liked you,” Nina joked after they’d turned the corner.
Brawley told her about the crazy bastard with the bugs in his beard.
“Fucking Chaotics,” she said. “We get a lot of them here. Key West is a magnet for psi mages who’ve lost their way.”
Brawley nodded. Her comment hit a little close to home. It was his dreams that had dragged him here, after all, not a travel brochure. “What, exactly, do you mean by Chaotics?”
“I told you about the seven orders,” she said. “We’re the Unbound. Sage is a Seeker. Remi’s a Carnal. That Cat Wizard guy was a Bestial. You saw ads for Gearheads and Benders. I mentioned the weird-ass Cosmics and the Order. Finally, you have people who break ties with their Orders and go off on their own. We call them Chaotics.
“A lot of them are homeless. They live on the streets, in tent cities, or in hobo jungles. Then you have your fugue-state types. They snap, lose their shit, and leave it all behind. They move halfway across the country, grow a beard, and spend the rest of their lives answering to “Fred” or “Joe” and washing dishes in the land of cash and shadows, waiting to die.
“Sadly, most of the Chaotics are crazy. Tons of mental health issues in our community, especially among Benders and Cosmics. Seekers, too.”
They turned down another street. This part of Key West was quiet and residential.
“But not all Chaotics are crazy,” Nina said. “You see exiles, gangs, fugitives. Communes in the woods, cults, anti-establishment compounds. And there’s the Psychic Underground living in the tunnels beneath Manhattan. To me, you’d have to be both homeless and crazy to live down there like moles, but word on the street is they’re organized. Some people say Clarissa Lemay is down there, calling the shots.”
“Who’s she?”
Nina laughed. “It’s crazy how much there is to tell you. Every psi kid on the planet is scared shitless of Clarissa Lemay. She’s the bogeywoman, the last power mage on Earth if you believe the stories, but personally, I think it’s a bunch of—”
“Nina Mack,” a deep voice said. A man in a blue and silver track suit stepped from the driver’s seat of a black Escalade and blocked their way.
Blocking the sidewalk was easier for this guy than it would be for most people. He was a big bastard. Thick bones, lots of muscle, and a big gut, too, like a former NFL linebacker gone to seed. The guy was Brawley’s height but probably three hundred pounds, maybe more.
He had a flat face. Dozens of scars twisted like pale rivers across the forest of black stubble atop his shaved head. A pair of tattooed teardrops dripped from the corner of one eye.
Beneath the unzipped windbreaker, he wore a black V-neck t-shirt, which contrasted sharply with the half dozen bright yellow chains gleaming on his neck and the many rings spread across his fat fingers like a pair of gold-plated brass knuckles.
“Gordo,” Nina chimed. “What a pleasant surprise.”
Gordo nodded toward the SUV. “Get in. Mr. Dutchman wants to see you.”
“Hmm,” Nina said. “Would that be Mr. Dutchman, Senior or Junior?”
“Junior. Now get in.” Gordo barely glanced at Brawley. Most people—and especially burly guys—took one look at Brawley and dismissed him as skinny. They’d seen too many movies and thought a man had to beef up like a steer to be strong. “And who the fuck are you supposed to be, her boyfriend?”
“I’m her man friend,” Brawley said.
Gordo made a whisking motion with his stubby, ring-studded fingers. “You go bye-bye and have a nice day.”
“You know, I’d really love to come with you,” Nina said, edging sideways, “but we’re running late. Tell Junior I said hey and I’ll be looking for him. ‘Kay? Bye-ee!”
She twiddled her fingers at the hulking hard ass and tried to scoot past him.
“You’re coming with me,” Gordo said, and he grabbed Nina by the wrist.
Brawley nailed him.
Gordo must have written him off, because he never saw the punch coming. The hellacious right cross caught him square on the hinge of the jaw.
Brawley followed up with a looping left hook that smashed Gordo straight in the nose.
Brawley knew he had dynamite in both hands, but this big fucker didn’t even buckle. That thick neck and lumpy head of his had taken the shots, no problem. Gordo just hunched into the blows and started turning toward Brawley, his flat nose streaming blood.
But rather than taking a swing or going for a tackle, Gordo reached around toward the small of his back.
Which meant he was packing. And which furthermore gave Brawley time to hit him again—and the motivation to take the big bastard out any way he could.
So Brawley said to hell with the punches and drove a stomping kick down on the big man’s leg just above the knee.
This time, Gordo buckled. But he stayed on his feet and kept going for his piece, so Brawley stomped him again.
Gordo’s leg gave with a loud cracking sound. The big man cried out and fell face-first onto the sidewalk.
Brawley leaned over, jerked up Gordo’s windbreaker, and pulled a stubby automatic from the screaming man’s waistband.
Jamming a knee into Gordo’s spine, he seized the back of his muscular neck and pressed the muzzle against the stubbly temple. “Stop your screaming and listen,” Brawley said. “This? What happened to you? It’s nothing. You come knocking on my door again, I’m going to open it all the way. Understand?”
“Fuck you,” Gordo spat.
“That might sound tougher if you weren’t laying on the ground with your own piece pressed to your head. But I need you to understand, Gordo. If you come at us again, I will put a bullet through your brains. That’s a promise. And I always keep my promises.”
“Come on,” Nina said, tugging at Brawley’s arm, and they hurried off down the street, Brawley holding the pistol at his side and trying to look natural.
They hung a hard left. Brawley stopped long enough to check the weapon. It was an older Glock knockoff, a single-action Smith & Wesson Sigma 9.
He popped the magazine and pulled back the slide, jacking a round to the macadam. A fucking hollow-point. He released the slide, dry-fired the weapon, and jammed the magazine back into place.
> Someone had filed off the serial number. No surprise there.
Texas had reciprocity with Florida and every state in between, so Brawley’s permit was good here, but that wouldn’t do him any good if he got picked up carrying a black market piece, especially if the pistol in question had ballistics matching open criminal investigations.
The smart move would be to wipe the thing down and drop it into a dumpster, but he felt naked without a firearm. His XDS was across the island in the Winnebago, and the rest of his firearms were back in the Lone Star State. So he shoved the muzzle into his waistband and let his shirt fall over it.
“Shitfuckpissmotherfuckingassholeshit,” Nina seethed, tugging him down the alley again. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. We are in deep shit.”
Brawley realized then that he was grinning. He hadn’t been in a scrap for a while, not since that drunk in Oklahoma had sucker punched him. Hell, that had been a year ago, maybe longer.
“Why are you smiling?” Nina said. “Do you have any idea who that guy was, who he works for?”
“Psi mafia, I’m guessing.”
“Exactly, which means, as I was trying to inform you when I realized that you were grinning like a madman, that we are in deep shit.”
Brawley shrugged. “I don’t know. We could’ve made out worse. Come on, let’s turn onto this street. More people.”
They slipped into the flow of foot traffic. It was a beautiful day, and the tourists were out in full force.
The knuckles of Brawley’s left hand ached a little, but he didn’t think he’d broken anything. Otherwise, he felt fine. Better than fine. Jazzed up, alive, like he’d just ridden a rank bull to the bell and scored 90 plus.
They turned onto Duval Street, where the crowds grew even thicker, people of all ages ambling in happy packs past the shops and bars, everything bright and cheery as a postcard come to life.
Nina calmed down a little. “Gordo’s a fuggle. He works for Mr. Dutchman but pals around with Junior.”
“So that means Junior and his boys were shaking down the Cat Wizard as a side hustle.”
Nina nodded. “If his father finds out, he’ll go ballistic.”
“So Junior wants to warn you to keep your mouth shut.”
