It was a very dangerous question. I sensed the sick fury building in him, and he was mere seconds from pulling the trigger that would kill me.
“Who’s my son?” he repeated. He grabbed a fistful of my pink hair and yanked my head painfully back. “Who’s my son? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Randy,” the other cop said. “This guy’s got a point. We’re exposed out here. You want to get straight answers, we can’t do it right here on the side of the road, man.”
“Cameras can be smashed,” Randy said.
“Maybe so, but passing cars can’t.”
Randy hesitated, then grabbed the handcuffs and hauled me up to my feet. He shoved me in the direction of the police car as his partner opened the back door and put Luis inside. Luis didn’t fight, but as we approached the vehicle the stench of it rolled over me—hot metal, vomit, despair, sweat, blood, stale air, and the reek of plastic—and it was hard not to dig in my feet and resist.
No. I had to learn to deal with this strange problem of mine sometime, and now, with a gun aimed at my head, it seemed a good time to begin.
I told myself it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought, once I was inside the police car, but that was a fragile sort of lie that crumbled as soon as the door slammed shut beside me. The air was stifling, and it reeked. I coughed, barely controlling an urge to void my stomach, and tried not to struggle like an animal in a trap.
I am Djinn. This is nothing, nothing, nothing.
No. It was confinement. And confinement was something the Djinn hated.
Officer Randy and his partner got in the vehicle, which rocked to accommodate their weight, and we pulled out onto the road.
“You okay?” Luis asked me in a low voice. I nodded, throat working, unable to speak. I had never liked enclosed vehicles, but this one seemed ever more sinister and confining. “Don’t do anything crazy.”
“Yeah, listen to your friend,” Randy said. We had gone about five miles from where we’d left the Victory, and now he slowed the cruiser and made a right turn on to a barely visible dirt road. The car bounced and rocked along the trail, throwing up showers of dust and rocks.
When we could no longer see the road behind us, he brought the car to a stop and turned off the engine. The tick-tick-tick of cooling metal and the constant low chatter from the radio speakers were the only sounds.
“Out,” Randy said. His partner gave him a worried look, but complied. He and Randy opened our doors and removed us from the backseat, out into open air again. The hot air fanned the sweat that had trickled down my back, and I shivered.
Randy drew his gun again, staring at me with cool, dust brown eyes. He was a hard man, but I didn’t sense real cruelty in him. Desperation, perhaps.
“Now,” he said. “Let’s start the movie over. Where’s my son?”
Luis shook his head. “We don’t know what you’re talking about, Officer. We really don’t.”
He stuck the barrel of his gun under Luis’s chin, and Luis’s eyes squeezed shut to conceal what must have been either rage or fear. He didn’t move, but I saw muscles flexing in his tattooed arms.
I, too, was remembering his brother, dead of a bullet.
“I’m going to kill this guy,” Randy said, “and then you’ll remember what I’m talking about. How’s that?”
“If you do, you’re a fool,” I said, and got the full cold glare. He didn’t move the gun away from Luis. “Explain what’s happening. Maybe we can help you. We’re also looking for a child. A little girl, Isabel Rocha. She’s five years old. She’s been abducted from her bed.”
That surprised him enough to take his finger away from the trigger and lower the weapon to his side. “What?”
“She’s my niece,” Luis said raggedly. “My brother and sister died in a drive-by a couple of days ago. Ibby’s all I have left.” For just that moment, he couldn’t conceal the horror and despair of that, and I knew it rang true with the policeman, who took another sharp look at Luis, then at me. Frowning. “God-dammit, you have to believe us!”
It was convincing enough to cause uncertainty in our captor. And the frustration. “A kid,” he repeated. “What the hell is going on?”
“Who is your son?” I asked softly. Randy didn’t take his gaze from Luis.
“His name is C.T. Calvin Theodore Styles,” Randy said. “He’s five years old, and he was taken out of his bed three nights ago. Just—gone. No sign of an intruder, no clues.”
Randy’s partner, who seemed visibly relieved that violence wasn’t about to erupt, contributed the rest. “Randy got a call a couple of hours ago,” he said. “Came to his personal cell phone, said the one who’d abducted C.T. had left him somewhere to die, and was heading this way.”
Randy finally shifted his attention back to me. “The caller said I’d know her by the motorcycle and the pink hair.”
“That caller,” I replied, “is the one who has your son, and more than likely Isabel. I have nothing to do with it, but they are using you, and me, to slow down pursuit.”
Randy kept staring at me. “I get why he’s in this,” he said. “Family. Why are you?”
It seemed a fair question, and all I could do was shrug, as hard as that was to do with my hands manacled behind my back. “Family,” I said. “They’re all I have, as well.”
That, too, rang true to his lie-sensitive ears, and he exchanged a glance with his partner, who nodded. Without a word between them, they unlocked our handcuffs. Handcuffs, I realized, that either of us could have melted away at any moment . . . and had not. Luis had likely been biding his time, waiting for a strategic moment. I had been—what? Distracted? Djinn are not distracted.
“You got a picture of the girl?” the policeman was asking.
“Yeah,” Luis said. He dug in his back pocket and flipped photos, stopping on one that showed Manny, Angela, and Isabel in some sort of holiday setting. They were frozen in that moment, happy and glowing. Alive.
It hurt me to look at it. This is how things are for them. Time is a long road, with tragedy around every turn. They can’t go back; they can only bring the past forward with them in fragments and photographs and memories.
No, not them. I was human now, to all intents and purposes. Like them, I was traveling that road now, and time was an enemy: a thief, stealing moments and memories and lives.
Randy—Officer Styles—flipped to Luis’s identification card, then examined his other photographs before handing it all back. He was cautious, which reflected well on him. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said. “They look like nice people.”
“They were,” Luis said. I could tell it was still hard for him to use the past tense of the verb. He put his wallet back in his pocket and sent me a glance. “So where are we? We good now?”
“Yeah,” the policeman nodded. “We’re good, until I find out you’re shining me on, and then both of you are food for crows if I find out you had anything, anything to do with my son’s abduction. Clear?”
Luis nodded. “Clear.”
Officer Styles’s attention turned to me. “Pink, what’s your name?”
I almost answered Cassiel, but stopped myself. He had been thorough in checking Luis’s identity. He’d hardly take my word for it. In answer, I took my own wallet from my jacket pocket and handed it over. He flipped it open to the driver’s license. “Leslie Raine,” he said, and glanced up at me. “Picture doesn’t look much like you.”
“Do they ever?” Luis muttered. It was good he answered for me, because I felt stung. I had used a minor amount of power to adjust the photograph to resemble me. Was he implying that I was not skillful at such forgery?
“Huh,” Randy said. He studied the photo closely, then me, then the card again.
“I’m albino.” Several people had referred to me so; I thought it only fair to adopt the idea. “Perhaps we don’t photograph well.”