There just remained the question of how he used the heat to materialize. Before working on that, though, he ought to touch bases with Razor.
Line-of-sight took him to Sara’s window, where he passed inside and found Hamada in latex gloves, going through the middle drawer of the desk.
Hamada pulled out a spiral-bound book with index tabs. After flipping through it, he laid it on the laptop. “Got an address book.”
Since he doubted Hamada meant the comment for him, Cole checked the bedroom. Where he found Razor laying boxes from the closet shelf on the bed.
Cole waved at him from the doorway. “I’m baaack.”
To his dismay Razor showed no reaction, not even a flicker in his eyes as he brought the last couple of boxes to the bed.
Cole moved over to the bed and ran a hand front of Razor’s eyes. “Hey, partner. Have you stopped seeing me?”
Apparently. Razor opened the first box and lifted out a wool shawl.
Oh-kay…reminder time. Cole walked through Razor. “Heads up!” And grinned at Razor’s intake of breath and jump in heart rate. “Can you see me now?”
“That was cute.” Razor stuffed the shawl back in its box.
Cole sat down on a corner of the bed. “It could have been worse. I thought about grabbing your nuts.”
“Not a good way to stay friends.” Razor opened another box. It held a vaquero-style hat. “Have you been lurking since we came in? Do you see anything suggesting Sara didn’t pack?”
“No and no. But…” Cole told him about the fire and materializing. “Now I need to see if I can pull it off again. Do we know yet whether this alleged Sara Benay boarded the plane?”
“She did.”
Then it really was Sara? Cole felt torn between relief she was alive and worry over her possible involvement in his death.
Hamada called, “Are you talking to me?”
Razor grimaced. “Just myself,” he called back. “There’s no sign of a gun or ammunition so far.” He opening another box, whispering, “Dennis called Hamada about it a few minutes ago.”
A thought struck Cole. “Did we check to see if she went all the way to Key West?”
“She missed the connecting flight in Chicago.”
Relief evaporated. Shit. “Then it could be Irah. She went as far as Chicago and flew back on another airline.”
Razor cocked a brow at him. “You realize Chicago’s only a few hours from Bloomington by bus or car.”
That was a thought, too. If Sara gave her family a convincing story about needing her whereabouts kept secret, they might lie about here being there. “Is Hamada having the Bloomington PD check for her?”
Razor nodded.
But Cole’s gut feeling doubted they would find her. The mother had not sounded like someone lying. “I think it was Irah on the plane.” His stomach knotted around lead and ice. “I’m afraid she killed Sara. We need to check flights from Chicago to SFO.”
“We’re not going to talk Hamada into that without probable cause.”
The perpetual problem in dealing with the Flaxx clan. “Maybe I can find out if Irah was at the office on Thursday.” He turned toward the door. “Catch you later.”
“Where and when?”
Cole stopped. “Where will you be in, say…” He checked the clock on bed table. “…two hours?”
“Oh…” Razor opened another box. “…I thought I might talk to Sherrie and tell her what that nurse, Brewer, really saw.”
Cole felt his chest tighten. “Thanks, amigo.” He hoped she listened. Without Sara, Razor was all he had to speak for him. “You’re the best. I’ll try to catch you there.”
He left through the front windows again, trying not to think about Sherrie. Right now he had other business. The easiest way to find out where Irah was on Thursday might be to ask. But for that he needed to be visible. The sensations at the fire remained vivid…energy pouring into him, his fear for the trapped woman, the driving urgency to make the firefighters see him. What baffled him was how, exactly, that made him materialize.
To work it out, first he needed heat. If he wanted that to come from internal combustion, he also needed a busy intersection. Letting cars run through him last night had been exhilarating, but collecting heat from groups of stationary vehicles seemed more efficient.
After climbing high enough to go line-of-sight to a street of choice, Cole chose O’Farrell. It not only had busy intersections, its proximity to the Tenderloin gave him test subjects…hotel and store clerks who had seen too much weirdness there to freak out if his first tries were only partially successful.
After checking out several hotels and stores around O’Farrell, Cole found the perfect subject…a clerk in an adult book and video store, whose purple hair and implants under the skin on her forehead and bridge of her nose made her look like one of Star Trek’s aliens. Stepping into the intersection near the store, he reflected that she would probably be thrilled if someone seemed to beam down in front of her.
Beam down! The words echoed in Cole’s head. He listened, stunned. Yes! That explained ziptripping! It was like beaming. Beaming needed coordinates. He must, too…knowing not only what his destination looked like, but where it was. He moved forward again, stepping into the motor of a delivery truck, the excitement in his racing mind surpassing even the pleasure of the machine gun blasts from the engine cylinders. That explained why he went home and to Burglary so easily. Picturing them included their location on his mental map of the city.
The truck’s engine coughed. Cole hurriedly moved to the car in the next lane.
Location also accounted for the Coit Tower and Bay Bridge helping ziptrip to Razor’s and Homicide.
The car’s engine missed. Cole moved on, zig-zagging between lanes. He shoved aside the excitement over ziptripping, and the urge to check right now whether he finally had it nailed, to think about materialization. Trolling traffic seemed to be working. While not the blast of energy the fire gave him, the little blasts, each more intense than the fire, added up. When he had enough heat energy, though, he better have some idea how to go about materializing.
Cole replayed memories of the fire while continuing to work his way through the idling vehicles. To his frustration, he remembered nothing except sucking in heat and desperately wanting the firefighters to see him. Maybe he just needed to will himself visible once he soaked up enough energy. Which felt about now.
He trotted down the block to the porno shop. As he approached the clerk, who stood reading a magazine spread open on the counter, Cole willed himself visible, driving it with a sense of urgency. Visibility had been a life or death situation for the old woman. This time he pictured Irah running away, a distant figure on a vast plain, dragging Sara with her. Whether Sara was alive or dead, he could not tell…just that they were disappearing, and with them, the chance of catching Irah. He needed the clerk to see him. She must see him.
The sense of weight he felt at the fire never came.
Shit. He had the energy…dissipating rapidly as he stood here…and he certainly had the desire to be visible. What the hell else did he need for materializing. Some extra mental trick, no doubt…like everything else in this damn ghost business!
Cole thought about that. Maybe it did take a mental trick. For ziptrips he had to picture himself at his destination. Materializing might need something like that, too. Not just the desire to be visible but imagining himself being seen. At the fire, he might have done that, imagining himself seen through the firefighters’ eyes.
Much of the collected energy had gone but he might as well try again with the little left. He built a mental image of himself, feeling almost as if he molded it from the energy in him, and saw the clerk seeing him.
And…yes! He felt heavier. Not as weighty as before but little beefed-up. “Excuse me.”