“I don’t know how,” I said.
I shouldn’t have been able to see the green fire in her eyes, but I did, just as I knew Dickert’s were red coals. “Open your hands, Jason. Open your hands.”
What? An image shot into my brain-the rabbi, in the kitchen, his fist bunched against his chest: Open your heart.
My palms itched. They began to heat. I stared, and they were glowing, beginning to crackle, and now the air they held whirled, the strands of two glowing orbs of energy coalescing, one in each palm, pulling together like the arms of a Milky Way galaxy spinning backward.
Without knowing why I did it, yet understanding that this was the only way, I thrust my hands toward the field. The moment of contact was brutal and solid, like twin jackhammers punching through concrete that rattled to my shoulders and down my spine. A tremendous BOOM, and then the field shattered, turning into opaque shards that sprayed indigo rooster tails of eerie light.
And then we were through, Sarah’s hand clamped firmly around my wrist, moving with the speed of avenging angels.
Dickert-whatever he was-roared. Wheeling about, he started for us. His body bent, shifted, transmogrified, and now a fan of sinewy dragons sprouted from his torso. They bellowed.
“Get the girl!” Sarah shouted. She let go. “Then get out of here!”
“Not without you!”
“No time!” And then she was sprinting for Dickert, driving hard, running full tilt, hair billowing.
Rearing up, the dragons spouted fire.
“Sarah!” I shouted. Somehow I had reached the girl; she was quaking under my hands, shivering as if with a lethal fever. “It’s okay,” I said, thinking, liar, liar!
With a bugling ululation, the dragons let loose fireballs: huge, all orange-yellow flame.
Sarah saw them coming. Still running, she lifted both arms in a great fluttering motion as if snapping a sheet. An instant later, the fireballs connected, squashing flat against some invisible mantle, raining flames on either side of an invisible dome.
Her tattoos-how could I see them? Her tattoos were moving. A spray of arms, muscular and thick with scythe-like talons, unspooled from her body, like those from a many-armed goddess. They whip-snapped the distance between her and Dickert, powerful hands clamping around the dragons’ necks even as the dragons twined round her arms. When they crashed together, the air split with a cannonade of thunder.
And then the most remarkable thing: Sarah’s form blurred, got fuzzy-and then the girl, the one I’d seen die in silent agony over forty years ago, stepped away from Sarah’s body. The girl was all colors and no colors; her eyes were white light, and when she opened her mouth, brilliant lambent pillars shot forth as if all the heavens had gathered in that one place, in that one time.
Dickert bellowed as the light splashed and broke over him, and he backpedaled, off balance. The dragons’ heads smoked, then sprouted frills of fire. The air thrummed with a high-pitched squealing that shook the earth beneath my feet. The dragons dissolved, and then Dickert-just a man, now-went down.
Sarah reeled, then stumbled backward as the girl tore herself free, spreading upon the air, now white, now black as a mantle of the deepest starless night-and flung herself over Dickert’s body.
And yet I could see everything, and I knew that what I saw now was tit for tat. Death dealt out in equal measure.
Dickert’s back arched, yet no sound issued from his wide open mouth. He was slowly suffocating, and I knew just what that felt like. His legs flexed and pedaled to nowhere. His hands were at his throat, his fingers clawing his own flesh to bloody ribbons. His face was going plummy purple, eyes bulging now not in rage or triumph but terror.
Still holding the girl, I knelt beside Sarah. Touched her shoulder. She pulled her head around, and with my strange new sight, I saw that her eyes were still green, but for the moment, there was no one else there.
I looked at Dickert. His legs were shivering, his hands fluttering in death tremors.
“It’s over,” Sarah said. “Until next time.”
VII
When Rollins and Arlington ’s finest showed up at Dickert’s rentals, they found a clutch of seven girls in each. The youngest was ten, the eldest seventeen. Each had either been sold by their families or simply kidnapped. Of the twenty-one girls, thirteen were from South Vietnam, seven from Thailand, seven from Cambodia; all were smuggled in by way of the Canadian border into Minnesota. The houses were overseen by “mothers” hired to run the brothels.
They never found Call-Me-Bob. But the girl’s name was Tevy.
Cambodian for “Angel.”
In time, the DA saw the wisdom of not stringing up Lily Hopkins as an example. A smart DA, he got her remanded to a psychiatric facility and from there, probation and home.
I’m told Lily wasn’t in an institution very long. Her father came to be with her. They probably have a long row to hoe before they’re a family again.
But.
We live in hope.
Never did figure out who that poor Vietnamese girl had been. Sarah didn’t get a name, sorry, but she thought the girl might have been a collective Presence. Many villages in Vietnam and Cambodia had spirits attached to them. So perhaps the girl was the village, and the monk was dead. So.
What was past was past.
We couldn’t have taken it further, anyway. When I went back to look at the DVD, the disk was empty. Poof. Like magic.
As if I’d been allowed to see only what was required to act.
All accounts balanced.
And Sarah Wylde:
“A seer?” I asked. This was five days later. We were drinking good coffee-excellent coffee-at a little Ethiopian bakery-café off U in the Shaw District. “I’m no prophet.”
“Not a seer. A See-er. You’ve got the gift of Sight, not Future Sight, not clairvoyance, but the ability to see manifestations no one else can-and probably more abilities you don’t know. It’s what makes you a good detective. Your hunches? Those sudden aha moments when everything clicks into place?” She gave a lopsided smile, but her lip was almost normal. “That’s part of it. You’ve got something special.”
Then she touched her fingertips first to my forehead and then my chest, over my heart.
The place where, a year ago, another woman-different and yet somehow the same-placed her hand and told me why she’d waited around until I’d figured things out. Her mission, you might say.
“There and there,” Sarah said. “You’ve been… marked. You’re different.”
“But I’m just a cop.”
Who’s been touched by a woman who might have been an angel.
“If you were just or only a cop, you couldn’t have seen my avatars. Dickert would have been just a man. You’d never have found him. I’d never have found him either. Oh, I was… drawn to a certain point in time just as you were, and Dickert and MacAndrews and Lily Hopkins. But I don’t necessarily know a Malevolent when I see it. That’s why I mantled myself, so I could remain invisible until you’d found him or… you needed me.”
I touched the place where the amulet nestled against my skin. “Do you think the rabbi… that Dietterich…?”
“He sounds pretty intuitive. He must’ve sensed something, then given you the amulet, not really knowing how it was going to help.”
“And how did it? I still don’t get that.”
“Let me see it again.” She took the charm I proffered. Stared at it. Then she made a little aha sound and started digging through her purse. Fished out a compact. “Not gibberish. I just wasn’t looking right.”
“A compact? I didn’t know you were vain.”
“Don’t be mean. Look.” Opening the compact, she held the amulet so I could see its reflection in the compact’s mirror. “It’s a mirror script, like da Vinci’s handwriting. That’s ancient paleo-Hebrew from before the First Temple Era. Say, five thousand years ago. That one in the center with hooks like a bull’s skull?”