“Yeah. Well, not me personally. My talent is pretty low-key. But I dated a pyro girl for a while.” His mouth twisted. “She was hunted coast-to-coast.”
Pyro. Firestarter? I couldn’t imagine a positive outlet for that gift, but then I was biased. I shouldn’t let myself get distracted.
“What happened?”
To my surprise, he shut down. “We’re not here to talk about my romantic history.”
Since he didn’t want to talk about it, of course I couldn’t let it go. That aspect of my psyche explained a great deal about my relationship with Chance.
“White knight complex,” I realized aloud. “You go for the bad girl, the one with problems who blows up your car, trashes your house, and steals your wallet. It’s not her fault, of course. If she only had someone to love and understand her, that shit wouldn’t happen.”
“Shit.” He regarded me with narrowed eyes as Betsy served two sizzling steaks. “I thought I was the empath.”
“You are. That’s why this makes perfect sense. You want to save everyone because you know what they’re going through. Must make it hell on dating.”
“Tell me about it. Try arguing with someone, even if you know they’re wrong, when you can feel the hurt rolling off them in waves.”
“You just want to wrap her up in your arms and tell her everything’s going to be okay,” I said softly.
Saldana studied me with bitter chocolate eyes, and to my surprise, his gaze dropped first. He attended to cutting his steak with a care that said I’d stepped too close to something private. We’d just met, after all.
For a while we just ate, didn’t talk. I thought maybe I’d crossed the line. The white noise of other voices covered the fact that nobody spoke at our table.
Finally he said, “Yeah, well. I can’t make everything better, but I can put you on the path to meeting more people like us. You already know you can recognize them from the shock. Let’s see, what else? Oh, I’ll write down the Web site address and log-in.” He pulled a pen from his pocket, scrawled something on a napkin, and passed it to me.
“Thanks.” I tucked it into my handbag, a gorgeous beaded creation I’d bought at Mundo E.
“On those boards you can find witches, warlocks, psychics, far-seers, pyros, empaths—pretty much the whole gamut of talents, though I don’t think I’ve ever run across another handler on there. I don’t vouch for character, though, Corine. Just because they’re gifted, it doesn’t make them trustworthy. So if you decide to see someone off-line, use the same care you would under normal circumstances.”
Was I the only person in the world who didn’t get on Match.com for a date? “I’ve never done that.”
“That means don’t tell the person where you live. Meet in a public place. Common sense stuff. But the board is great for finding someone who can help you with specialized research or answer questions about another type of gift. I used it quite a bit to try to understand Heather.”
“The pyro girl?”
“Yeah.” He didn’t elaborate, though, and I didn’t press. “If you want, I’ll take you to Twilight. We could be there by eleven and they’re open until three. We’d need to spend the night in San Antonio, though.”
I didn’t know how to take that invitation. “Don’t you have work tomorrow?”
Saldana shook his head. “Day off. We can hit Twilight tonight, find a place to stay, and then drive back in the morning. There’s someone I want you to meet.”
I hesitated. “If I go, you get me an unofficial look at the purse.”
“Hey, I’m trying to help you here, and you’re asking for more favors?”
At that I pushed my plate away. I’d eaten maybe half the steak and nibbled at the salad. “Look, I have only your word you want to help me. I’m supposed to accept there’s a gifted underground just on your say-so? I’m supposed to drive two hours to a club because you want me to? Sorry, Saldana, but it doesn’t work like that. You might be a cop, but you haven’t proven yourself to me. Something bad could still happen if I go off with you, so you need to sweeten the deal. Give me a reason to take the risk.”
For a minute I thought I’d pushed him too far. His mouth tightened and he threw his napkin on the table like he meant to leave. Well, fine. I had the log-in. I could check things out on my own.
“Deal,” he said, throwing down some twenties for the bill. “You come with me tonight, and I get you a look at the purse tomorrow. Let’s get going.”
Traveling Blues
Talk about surreal.
Before we left, I called Chuch and asked him if he minded picking up the Camry. This served several purposes. The car wouldn’t sit all night outside Logan’s Roadhouse, Chance would have it if he needed it, and I didn’t have to tell him that I was going to San Antonio with a guy I’d just met. I didn’t envy Chuch that job.
It also served as personal security. Chuch knew where I was going and with whom. I didn’t think Saldana chopped women up and strewed their body parts along the highway to make them harder to identify, but—
Well. I knew too much about killers for my own peace of mind, but last I heard, Kel Ferguson was still in prison. And he’d never chopped up his victims as far as I knew. Quite the contrary, Ferguson had killed with a clean, cold precision that made him seem soulless. Ironic that he’d first been arrested on a kidnapping charge, but once he was in the system, his DNA tied him to a whole string of unsolved crimes.
I preferred to think about the little girl we saved.
With a faint sigh, I climbed into the cop’s black Forester. Nice ride, with anthracite cloth interiors, though a little surprising. I’d pegged him as an Avalanche kind of guy.
Saldana played the Dixie Chicks on the way. He didn’t say much, and I couldn’t blame him. My trepidation probably registered on his radar, so it’d be hard for him not to resent it. I wished I could tell him it wasn’t personal.
He slid me a look I found hard to interpret through the intermittent light from oncoming cars. “So tell me, do you ever let down your guard?”
The empathy thing would get old, I decided. Women wished for guys who always knew when something was wrong, even when they didn’t tell them, but it was quite another thing to be confronted with the long, tall reality of one.
“Once. It didn’t end well.”
That was an understatement. I was talking about Chance.
The road from Laredo to San Antonio offered nothing scenic after dark. Still I turned my face toward the window because I didn’t want to encourage him. Maybe he even saw in me one of his broken girls, a fixer-upper who needed somebody to understand her.
However, if this underground existed, then I might be able to use it to search for Min. I wasn’t sure what use I could make of it, but I knew better than to waste resources. As it stood, we needed every edge to figure out what the hell was going on.
Poor Chance.
Saldana chose the one conversational gambit guaranteed to catch my attention. “You going to tell me what went down at the warehouse?” While I weighed the likelihood of that, he went on, “You have fresh cuts on the backs of your hands, consistent with flying glass. Now, I happen to know something about that, but I don’t give you anything until you come clean. Feel like trading info?”
That sounded like a variation on “you show me yours, I’ll show you mine,” a game that got me into trouble more than once. I narrowed my eyes. “You could be bluffing.”
What could he possibly know?
“I could be,” he allowed. “But I’m not. Feel free to think it over.” With an irritating half smile, he went back to driving.
I did, but the lights of San Antonio spread out before us before I made up my mind. “We went to check out the crime scene,” I said finally. “I found a button that showed me what happened there.”
“Which was?” To my surprise he accepted my words matter-of-factly. Then again, why wouldn’t he? “No, wait. Get to that later. What was the deal with the windows?” He shook his head. “The department can’t figure out what caused the pressure change that blew all the windows inward simultaneously. They’re throwing around all kinds of ideas.”