So far I hadn't tried ditching the guy behind me. Now I did, changing lanes, ducking behind delivery trucks, then making a last-minute move into an exit lane and onto the Santa Monica Freeway. And saw no more of him. I'd tried not to be too obvious about it; hopefully they wouldn't realize I knew I'd been followed.
I exited the Santa Monica onto LaBrea and drove back to the office. Why, I asked myself, had I been followed? The likeliest answer was, to find out where I'd come from. That could mean where I worked out of, or where I lived.
My tail should have seen my Colorado plates. Which should put them off. But would it? I couldn't be traced by them. The owner's—the firm's—address was confidential, available only to California and Colorado motor vehicle departments and to law enforcement agencies.
Did the church know that private investigation firms could use out-of-state plates? It had worked its way into detective dramas on TV and holos, much to Joe's disgust. And Prudential was the biggest and most prominent investigation firm in California; it would be the logical place to start checking. The Colorado plates would have to come off, just in case. Because Thomas could be dangerous; I felt sure of it now.
12
VIC AND TORY
The next day Tuuli and I drove to the Hollywood-Burbank Airport, and from there took a skybus to Sky Harbor in Phoenix. After a thirty-minute wait at Sky Harbor, we took the mail-stop shuttle that serves Wickenberg, Lake Havasu City, and places north from there. Places that didn't have scheduled air service in the days before AG.
All to the good, right? Skybuses can be small and still economical to operate, which means you can have a lot of small ones with frequent departures. Also they're a lot cheaper to build than airplanes were. They land and take off vertically, make slow and almost silent approaches, and they're a lot cheaper, easier, and safer to fly than the big, clumsy, noisy, polluting airfoil craft of six or eight years ago. And they don't require roads, runways, or large fields. All in all they're like a clean, superfast bus service, which is why people started calling them skybuses.
Almost no one today wants to go back to the old ways of travel. Or telephoning. Or going to the library or heating a building, or . . . You name it. The problem is, you never have a chance to get used to things. You learn a trade today, and it may disappear tomorrow. Not mine, but a lot of them. Forty or fifty years ago, a guy named Toffler wrote a book called Future Shock. I read it about the time—about the time my folks were killed, and it was old then. If he wrote it today, he could call it Now Shock. And twenty, twenty-five years ago, a science fiction writer named Vinge—Vernor Vinge—wrote about a future when things changed so fast that people—biological people—couldn't handle it anymore. Well, I'll tell you what. When the research in nanotechnology breaks through the barriers it's run into . . .
Sorry. That's not what you're here to record. Blame it on the Veritas. So. Where were we? Oh yeah. Tuuli and I were going to visit the Merlins. Vic was waiting for us at the Wickenberg airport. He turned out to be a sprightly old guy. I'd have judged him at a lively seventy-five and been short by ten years. He was also taller than I'd expected, but thin: close to 6 feet and probably 130 pounds. But in jeans, a twill workshirt, and work boots, he looked lean and wiry, not frail. He shook my hand with a strong grip, and appreciated Tuuli with his eyes. I could tell she loved him right away.
My first impression was, he'd never murder anyone.
He led us to his pickup and we sped away from town, at first on a highway, then on a narrow blacktop road too minor to rate a center stripe. The air was dry, the April sun bright, and the desert had more vegetation than you might think. It was dominated mainly by what Vic identified for me as mesquite—broad, thorny, 6- to 10-foot shrubs—and in places by what he called creosote bush. There were also lots of spiny cane cactuses 3 to 5 feet tall with big pink flowers, and similar ones so thick with stiff pale spines, they seemed to wear a white aura. He called both kinds chollas. There was a scattering of saguaro cactus, too, some of them 30 feet tall. Vic said they were getting toward their upper elevation limit there. Graceful ocotillas were scattered almost everywhere. Shrubs I guess you could call them, thorny shrubs without twigs or branches, their leaves tiny and sparse, but bright green. Their spiny, sprawling, multiple green stems grew from a common base, to spread 20, maybe 30 feet across, each stem ending with clusters of vivid red flowers.
I could get to like that country, at least in the spring.
After a while we came to a mailbox that read Vic & Tory Merlin, and from there left the blacktop for a private road that obviously had never known an engineer or road grader. In about a mile of gradual climbing, we reached a range of hills that, farther on, grew to a long low mountain, and the road entered a small canyon. A little brook trickled down it, among rounded stones, with groups of distorted old cottonwoods along its banks. During the occasional storm, according to Vic, the brook could become quite a stream, though most of the time it was dry.
About a mile up the canyon we came to their home, a low, pink-tan adobe ranchhouse with narrow, deep-set windows. Behind it, a windmill pumped water to a tank on a roof-high timber platform, the water supply for the house. They had a GPC-driven pump that did their pumping when the wind was down—gravity is always there, and as cheap as the wind—but Vic said they enjoyed having the windmill do it.
Tory was on the porch to greet us, a small woman, not much bigger than Tuuli. Her hair was still red-tinged, though she was probably as old as her husband. Her eyes were chestnut brown like Molly Cadigan's, and just as direct and powerful. But her look was less aggressive than Molly's, more calm and—knowing is the word, I guess. I don't believe anything could flap her—not the arrival of the angel of death, not the end of the world. According to Winifred Sproule, Ray Christman thought Tory was as powerful as Vic. I wasn't sure what Christman meant by powerful—I wasn't sure what I meant by powerful—but it seemed to me that if anything she might be more powerful than Vic. And I got that impression just in the minute or so between being introduced on the porch and her going into the kitchen to check on the coffee. She seemed to me like someone who could pretty much control whatever went on around her, if she wanted to.
The living room was big, the ceiling supported by vigas, rough-hewn timbers with axe marks on them. More than a century old, I'd guess. One wall had a wide adobe fireplace. Tuuli and I had taken seats on a comfortable benchlike sofa that might have been made of local cottonwood, upholstered with big fat cushions. Vic sat across from us in a wicker rocker that would have seemed old-fashioned to my dad, who was born in 1917.
"How did you know about Tuuli?" I asked.
He grinned at me. "We've got friends who keep up to date on psychics and who did what." He turned to Tuuli then. "We first heard about you after you took care of the poltergeist that Emmy Raye Crockett had trouble with, after she bought that mansion at Pacific Palisades."
I looked at my wife. She'd never told me anything about a poltergeist! It must have been before I'd met her. And for Emmy Raye Crockett! Doing a successful psychic gig for a major, free-talking country-western star must have gotten important word-of-mouth promotion, as well as publicity in the New Age magazines and newsletters.
"How'd you handle that?" he asked.
Tuuli blushed, something I'd never seen her do before. "I'm not sure," she said. "Well, I guess I am now, partly, but at the time . . . When the dishes started to fly, and the ashtrays and books, my hair stood out like this." She held her hands a foot from her head. "So I admired it. I thought, you are amazing! Truly marvelous! And I meant it, because it was. It really was.