The Operator

by Kim Harrison

CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SIX

  The Pinto’s engine sputtered, exhilaration filling her as they sped down the expressway, headed for the overpass and the unseen spike strip.

  “Let’s steal the Pinto,” Jack said mockingly as the WEFT vehicle was left behind, swarmed by the cops like ants on a caterpillar. “I love a car that explodes when you hit it.”

  Face white, Silas watched the chaos go distant through the rearview mirror. “Watch for the spike strip,” he said as he braced his arms. “Right side. If you slow down at the exact moment, it will pass in front of you.”

  She’d put them five, maybe six seconds back, not wanting to lose chunks of time. But with Jack in the car, it might not matter. The spike strip was the least of her worries, and her sweat went cold. She couldn’t jump without opening her mind, making it vulnerable.

  “I swear, Jack, if you scrub me, I will kill you,” she threatened, and Silas’s eyes widened, echoing her new fear. “You hear me!” she exclaimed. “Silas is an anchor, and he’ll know! If you touch my mind, I will kill you twice!”

  “Spike strip!” Silas reminded them, pointing.

  “Screw it!” she yelled, jerking the wheel again as the strip slid out.

  “Yeee-haa!” Jack shouted as the tires skipped, narrowly keeping them on the road as they sped around it. His exuberant cry seemed to bounce against the dash and explode into red sparkles. She breathed them in, hands clenched in fear. If he touches me, I’ll kill him, she thought.

  And then she exhaled, and forgot.

  Her head seemed to split apart, and she gasped as the world snapped back into place.

  “I didn’t touch your mind!” Jack exclaimed, one arm clamped over the seat to put his face next to hers. “You swerved to avoid a spike strip, hit the wall, and drafted.”

  Dizziness swam up from the sound of the racing engine, and she looked at Silas, who nodded. She glanced behind them, seeing the cop car hit the strip instead. The car behind it swerved to miss him, overcompensated, and hit the wall. Two down.

  Jack retreated into the backseat, content for the moment. “Damn!” he whispered, clearly happy. “I missed you, Peri. We have got to get off this road, though.”

  Three high-powered Fed drones swung into place overhead, their stronger charge maintaining the eighty miles an hour the Pinto could manage. They were passing the park, but two more cars had filed in behind, closing the gap. They had maybe seconds between them, no more. “We’re ditching the car. Hold on,” she muttered as she yanked the car off the road, bouncing over a ditch, through a wire fence.

  Pain thundered in her head and neck, and she realized she’d hit her head on the ceiling. Dizzy, she aimed for the parking lot. Dead grass and icy clods of mud spurted up behind them. LB would be there. He had to be.

  “There!” One hand on the ceiling, Jack pointed between them out the front window. “LB’s trident!”

  Her head still hurt, and she blinked fast to focus. Suddenly she realized she was going to pass out.

  “Peri!” Silas shouted as her body went slack. “Take your foot off the gas! Take it off!”

  Eyes closed, she distantly heard the Pinto’s engine race. Jack swore, and then her head swung forward as they hit something. Arms limp, she let go of the wheel. The engine choked and died. “Ow,” she whispered, squinting at the sudden flush of cold air.

  “Shit, woman. You know how to make an entrance.” Someone smelling of pot and old cigarettes leaned close, and she struggled to focus. It was LB, and as Silas fumbled at her belt, LB stood over them, his hands on his hips. She could hear kids in the background, and the pop of a gun followed by a cheer.

  “Thank God you’re here,” she slurred, slapping Silas’s hands away. “I can do it myself,” she said, but her fingers wouldn’t work. “Where’s my bag?” She blinked, relieved when Silas pushed it into her hand.

  LB fidgeted at her open door, impatient. “I got my boys out here on the excuse to shoot down some payloads,” the scrawny man said. “There’s a droneway that passes over the park. It’s off our turf, but letting them take potshots at them got enough of them out here that any local cops will think twice.” His gaze went to the horizon. “There they are.”

  She could hear sirens, and the sudden bang and cheer when someone took out a drone. Peri blinked fast, her grip on her bag easing as her vision settled. “I thought Roosevelt belonged to the Scraps.”

  “Okay, she’s good,” Silas said from beside her, and LB grabbed her arm.

  “There haven’t been any Scraps since the early two thousands,” LB said as he pulled her out. “Me and the boys are Detroit’s last gang.”

  Somehow she thought that was a real shame as she found her feet, swaying until Silas came around the car and took her elbow. By the frozen pond, six people looking like Mad Max extras were taking turns shooting at drones, three Detroit muscle cars behind them looking used and aggressive. Several families with kids watched at the outskirts—not afraid. “Jack? Where’s Jack?” she said, then threw herself to the ground when a drone flying overhead exploded.

  LB and Silas ducked, but it was Jack who yanked her up, frowning at LB’s boys, laughing at the drone pinwheeling dramatically to crash and skid on the ice. “That was a Fed,” Jack said as he pushed Peri to the nearby van, brown with flaking paint and rust. “Only the Feds put self-destructs on their bees. Get her out of here. I’ll draw them off.”

  “Hey, wait!” Peri protested, but things were happening fast, and LB whistled three sharp notes in quick succession, turning heads.

  “Back on the boats!” LB shouted, and people moved, gathering downed payloads and running for the cars.

  “Jack is not running rabbit,” Peri said, frowning at the flashing lights of the incoming cops. Only now did the watching families scatter, which she thought was telling.

  “Get in the car,” LB demanded, then turned to Jack. “Take the Charger. It can handle a hit. Ed will get you clear, then you run. None of my boys are taking the rap for this.”

  “No,” Peri said, all but ignored. “Jack comes with me. I want him in LB jail.”

  “I’ll drive the Charger,” Silas demanded, then yelped when three big men pushed him into the back of a brown ’67 Pontiac GTO. His protests became violent until LB shoved her in with him, her short-job bag landing atop them both. The seat flipped back, trapping them, and Silas glowered as LB and another man got in front. “Don’t let Jack go. It’s a mistake!” he exclaimed as the angry engine rumbled to life, the roar joined by the Dodge Charger and Oldsmobile.

  “A big, beautiful mistake,” Peri whispered, numb as Jack in the Charger took off, leaving them and the Oldsmobile to go the other way. Jack was going to give the cops something to chase while they got away. And in turn, he’d be gone as well. Effin’ fantabulous.

  Silas was rummaging in the satchel, his motions becoming more and more frantic. “What is your problem?” she finally asked, and he looked up, grabbing the seat as they jostled off the parking lot and onto the grass.

  “I’m not used to being the smallest man in the room,” he muttered, hesitating with a Glock in his hand until seeing LB’s guy riding shotgun, using a rifle to take out the drones following them. “God bless it, I think Jack took it!”

  Peri held on to the door with one hand and propped herself up with the other. “Took what?”

  Silas kept looking, shoving everything from one side to the other. “The accelerator. He only touched the bag for like three seconds to hand it to me, and he took it!”

  Immediately she relaxed. “No, he didn’t. It’s in my sock.” Guilt flickered through her, not for having lifted it earlier, but for the remembered flash of desire when she’d stuffed it away.

  Silas’s eyes went from her foot to her face, his fear fighting with his obvious relief that she hadn’t used it. “What’s it doing there?”

  “Not getting stolen by Jack,” she said, the lure to inject herself even stronger after having drafted to escape both WEFT and Detroit’s fine
st. Forcing a smile, she zipped the satchel closed. As long as she wasn’t accelerated, she could still walk away from this and disappear. Maybe. “LB, where did you get these righteous cars?” she asked as they bounced and lurched over the grass, clods of frozen ground spurting up behind them.

  Behind the wheel, LB grinned, turning where he sat to see them. “When everyone left, the cars stayed behind. As long as there’s no computer, my guys can get them running; eBay does the rest.” His eyebrows rose in question. “Dr. Denier? You’re the reason I’m here. I want to talk to you.”

  “Sure,” Silas said guardedly. His attention alternated between LB and the front window as they careened over the park lawn, headed for a distant street. “Don’t you think you should be looking where you’re driving?”

  But there were no lines to stay within, much less a road, and LB laughed. “Shit, girl, you look like you haven’t slept in days. There’re easier ways to make a pickup than bringing the entire Detroit police force with you.”

  Her pulse leapt. “You have the Evocane,” she said, an unreasonable need rising from everywhere, crushing the faint vertigo. “Right now? With you?” With a final bounce, they found the road. Behind them, his guys were taking potshots at the drones that had followed them. Most were going the other way. Jack had bought her a way out. What it might cost her would probably be more than she wanted to pay.

  LB turned back to the front, weaving between the slower cars. “Yep.”

  “Give it to me. Now,” she demanded, and LB met her eyes in the rearview mirror. With a casual slowness, he took a vial from his shirt pocket and tossed it to her.

  It hit her palm, and she spun the warm glass to read the label, a flicker of mistrust dying at the thought he might have put anything in it. If it wasn’t Evocane, she’d bring him down. “Thank you,” she said softly as she dropped it into the satchel and zipped it closed.

  “Don’t thank me,” LB said, his expression empty. “Nothing is free.”

  Silas stiffened, and she raised her hand, telling him she’d handle it. “Yeah? Be nice, or I’ll shove it down your throat,” she threatened.

  “How do you know I haven’t sampled it already?” LB said slyly, and she relaxed.

  “Because if you had, you’d die before giving it to me.” Satisfied it was Evocane, she settled back, thinking it was odd that she was safe in the back of a drug lord’s GTO. “You shouldn’t have let Jack run rabbit.” Damn it, she had been hoping LB would hold him for her, and the man just let him walk.

  Thoughtful, LB followed the finger of the man riding shotgun to an upcoming exit. “Relax. The cops will get him. And if not, we will.”

  “Yeah? Good luck with that,” she said, then went silent, feeling her fatigue all the way to her bones. Despite what LB had said, she knew Jack was gone until he wanted to show. Worse, she didn’t know how she felt about that. She didn’t remember her draft, but she’d seen his eyes afterward. He hadn’t touched her mind—and even with Silas there, it had been the perfect time to scrub her.

  He was there for her, not Bill, and that changed everything . . . and nothing at all.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Packard’s main mall lacked the comfortable, familiar feel the repurposed automotive manufacturing plant usually did. It rankled Jack that it was probably because Peri wasn’t beside him, her slim, attractive figure drawing envious, appreciative glances, a reminder of how good they looked together. He got noticed on his own, but with Peri, the stares were envious.

  His attention drifted from the high support beams—repaired or replaced and acid etched to look old—down to his drink. The heavy paper straw he was using to stir his caramel banana smoothie had bent, and he grimaced. His hand ached, strained somewhere on Peri’s mad dash to Roosevelt Park, and he wished he’d gotten a frozen drink instead of the room-temperature fruit blend. Evading the local cops, and then LB’s gang after that, hadn’t been difficult. He’d been lucky that Peri had been knocked on the head and dazed; otherwise she’d never have let him drive off, the gang’s need for a rabbit or not. The only crime he regretted was having to dump the classic muscle car in the river.

  The mall was busy, the cinema having just let out its largest theater and sending almost seven hundred pumped-up moviegoers back into the upscale shops that lined the three-block social sink Detroit had created for their new population to spend their money and time.

  The Packard plant had been abandoned in the late fifties after having helped supply marine and aircraft engines for WWII. Almost vanishing from neglect, it was revitalized when it was realized that the distance between I-94 and Detroit’s rebuilt center was perfect. The derelict complex had been turned into a shopping experience like no other, where you could do everything from train your dog to publish your self-help video to enjoy a gourmet meal at one of the themed cafeterias or bars, before sleeping it off in one of the tiny hotel rooms affectionately named coffins. The complex was so large and sprawling that self-propelled vintage autos ran an assembly-line track right down the middle and through the more affluent shops: a loving nod to Detroit’s history.

  But old cars on tracks were less than useless to Jack, and giving up on his smoothie, he squinted up to the second-story level, where Harmony was burning off some steam in one of the athletic centers. The front of the dojo was glass, and the mixed class sparred over oblivious shoppers, their thumps and shouts muffled but audible over the surrounding chatter and the young-man band from Australia, in town and mixing up their rhythms with old black men who’d never left Detroit and lived the beat their entire rich lives.

  Even as he watched, the class ended. Jack didn’t move as Harmony chatted with a few of her friends before vanishing out of his line of sight and presumably downstairs. Uneasy, Jack resettled himself against the maple tree growing smack-dab in the middle of the walkway. According to urban legend, the tree had been growing out of the abandoned building when the developers had moved in. It had been allowed to remain, stretching to the distant glass ceiling as a reminder of how fragile man’s works were. It was Peri’s favorite spot in the mall—he had no clue why. An unexpected flash of angst lit through him at the reminder of her.

  Perhaps Peri wasn’t the only one conditioned to never be alone, he thought, then threw his half-empty cup away in disgust, deciding to blame his unease on his lack of a weapon. Outwitting TSA was a hell of a lot easier than bypassing the mall’s subtly integrated but efficient weapons detectors. Fortunately not all the toys in his pockets went bang.

  There was a soft chime and the receptacle beside him shifted from white to black. It was full, and with a slow movement, it began to move to the nearest reception niche for cleaning. Jack watched it go, his mood lifting when it stopped short, stymied by two boys messing with its obstacle recognition software until their mother jerked them out of its way.

  The crowd at the end of the hall cheered at the rising, complex rhythms coming faster from the freestyle concert. The memory of his and Peri’s last vacation flitted through him, the way she had found common ground with people so far from her. He didn’t understand how she could do that and still not love him. He hadn’t lied to her about his feelings; she had just extrapolated far beyond what they actually were.

  Eyes going to the dojo’s first-floor door, Jack straightened his newly purchased tie, glad he knew people here, people who would float him a suit without question, three years of healthy tips keeping their mouths shut about his ever having been in. A faint smile crossed Jack’s face. Detroit wasn’t his city, but he knew his way around her underskirts almost as well as Peri did. He chuckled when a memory intruded, of him and Peri at the big billiard hall over where the executive offices had once been. They’d capped the evening off with drinks and dancing in the members-only club. The view of Detroit always turned her soft and compliant—daring.

  Jack’s smile faltered. He had to get Peri back. He had no intention of retiring, and he’d become too accustomed to being bulletproof.

>   Good mood broken, he sat down on the ironworks bench, his knees spread wide as he waited. He didn’t need Harmony; he wanted her was all. The woman was a source of information, a buffer for when he found Peri, and cannon fodder in case there was trouble. This doubt that gnawed at him was becoming tiresome.

  He hadn’t lied when he told Bill he thought he could flip her back to Opti, but now he wasn’t so sure. The lure of remembering wasn’t as strong as Bill thought it would be. She didn’t need them. Didn’t need him. And that was more than dangerous, it was potentially deadly.

  He was nothing without Peri, an easily replaced cog. Only with her could everything return to as it had been. He might have romanced an understanding between them by promising to go ghost with her, but neither one of them would be able to stand such a mundane life. He just needed to get her away from Denier long enough for her to remember how good they had been. If that failed, he’d scrub her. She’d thank him in the end. And if she wanted Bill dead, he would keep that option open, too. Maybe then she’d believe him.

  Finally Harmony came out of the dojo, hesitating with her friends before the door. Jack’s eyes narrowed in concern, watching from under the drape of his bangs, but the thin woman in her colorful leggings said good-bye and went the other direction, a heavy tote bag over her shoulder and a sassy sway to her hips as she wove through the shoppers.

  Sucking his teeth, Jack rose and fell into step behind her, careful to keep her red cap just in sight. He was glad to have had the chance to see Harmony in action. Peri had taught him a healthy respect for what a woman could do, and he was used to maintaining a delicate balance of restraint without injury when dealing with them. He had Harmony on weight if nothing else.

  He almost lost her as he fended off two saleswomen trying to lure him into sampling a fragrance. The slight pause in motion triggered a trio of holographic mannequins from the upscale clothier, and they shifted to match his day-old stubble and tailored suit, trying to lure him in. It jerked the passing bevy of ogling girls to a stop, slowing him even more.