Chill Factor

There was a sun-faded dust-colored Jeep parked in the arroyo below, and the man next to it wasn't Chaz after all. Different body type-middle height, angular, wearing blue jeans and a black windbreaker with a black baseball cap. Aviator sunglasses. Pale skin, I thought, but that was just an impression, too fast to be reliable. As I came to a stop at the top of the hill, I saw that there was a woman with long black hair lying in the sand at his feet.

She'd fallen or been pushed down on the sand on her belly.

Fu

She was struggling as he knelt down beside her.

He was holding something that glinted hard steel in the morning sun for part of its length, dull red for the rest. As I watched, he plunged the knife overhand into the woman's back, and her reaching hands scratched at the sand, digging, digging, trying to dig her way to freedom.

I heard the high-pitched breathless screams.

I heard them stop.

Shock rolled over me, freezing me in place, and then it was pushed aside by an incoming storm of rage. I lifted up my arms and called the wind, felt it sigh and answer, as if it had been waiting for the chance. You bastard, you're not getting away with this… .

The man down in the arroyo looked up, and the aviator glasses flashed red in the rising sun. There was a bag on the ground next to the woman. Bottles spilling out of it, a confusion of glass winking in the dawn light.

It was a goddamn drug deal gone bad. This was what Chaz had been protecting. Murder.

"You bastard," I whispered, and gathered the wind in my hands to take him down.

Didn't work out that way.

Something hard hit me in the back of the head, and I remember falling, sliding weightlessly on cool dry sand down the hill, into darkness.

SIX

When I woke up, I was in darkness. My head throbbed like a high-performance engine in need of a tune-up, and I was folded into someplace cramped and hot. Blood tasted burnt copper in my mouth. It took me a few stupid seconds to remember where I'd been, what I'd seen, and I saw the man plunging the knife into the woman's unprotected back with a shock that made me flinch.

Focus, I told myself. My senses reported that I was probably in the trunk of a car. A nice big one, at least. Roomy. It smelled of spilled oil and hot metal. There was a wet softness underneath me, and that smelled like blood. Mine. My head was bleeding like a son of a bitch, and that edgy light-headedness-that came from shock.

Judging by the road vibration, we were on the highway. I reviewed my options. One, I could stay still and quiet and hope that a ruthless killer forgot he'd stored me back here. That option didn't look so good. Two, I could knock the car off the road with a wind strike, get out of the trunk, and rip the bastard limb from limb… that one was actually pretty attractive. I felt around and found nothing to use to pop the trunk- no tire iron, which was unfortunate; I'd feel a hell of a lot better with a big heavy weapon in my hand. I hadn't brought my cell phone on the run, and even if I had I doubted the coverage out here in the middle of nowhere.

The car was slowing down. I swallowed a burst of nausea and tried to put myself in the best position possible to launch myself out as soon as the trunk opened. Time to focus, get everything still and quiet inside so that I had the fine pinpoint control of the wind that I required. My pulse refused to cooperate. I’d worked under pressure before, but that had been when I was fighting nature, not a cold-blooded killer. I kept seeing the woman, the knife, the blood. I kept picturing myself facedown in the sand, digging for freedom.

A sudden application of brakes rolled me forward. We were stopping.

I gathered the threads of control together despite the sickening pain in my head. Thermals flowing high and deep, a layer of cool air sinking toward the ground. Warm air slowly circling up. The dance of a stable, quiet system. Chaz had manipulated it to drag the surveillance plane off course, but he'd put everything back, nice and neat.

A Warden had been an accomplice to murder. That made me sick to my soul.

I felt the car shudder as the driver's-side door slammed shut. Felt, rather than heard, footsteps crunching alongside. A key scraped metal somewhere near my nose, and I braced myself…

… and, as the dark got sliced in half by a square of lemon-yellow light, I let out a warrior's yell and lunged up, powered by feet braced against the quarter panel. I grabbed at the dark shape standing there, caught fabric, and as he flinched backward I held on and let him pull me the rest of the way out.

As my feet touched asphalt, I superheated the air above us and created the mother of all updrafts. Its power lifted us off the ground. I wrenched free of my captor and stumbled back against the trunk of the car as the man was yanked upward by the airflow, out of control.

"Wait a minute! Joa

Chaz Ashworth III, pale as milk, was hovering up there, on the verge of taking a trip to Oz the hard way. I had pla

Chaz wasn't the killer. That guy had been shorter, thi

I slowly reversed the process, calming down the wind a little at a time, balancing forces until Chaz touched down on the gravel of the shoulder of 1- 70. A petulant burst of wind blew past us, stinging me with sand.

"What the hell-" I began, but he held out both hands, palm out, to stop me.

"I can explain. Everything. Just… don't do that again, okay?" He looked genuinely spooked. "We can't stay here. Get in the car. Please. Hurry!"

"Why was I in the trunk?"

"It was the only way I could get you out of there without…" He darted anxious looks at the empty horizon, the blank shimmering road. "Just get in the car, okay? Please?"

"I saw him kill that woman." I don't know why I said it; it was almost as if the words were under pressure; I couldn't keep them in. I had to get rid of that moment, that image, that horrible silent pantomime of death. "He stabbed her in the back."

Chaz's face went even whiter, if that was possible, and his eyes had a blank, haunted look. He grabbed my arm, moved me aside, and slammed the trunk. Hustled me around to the passenger side of the car, which I now saw was his roadmonster of a Seville, maroon, with pimp-gold trim and wheels. I wasn't shocked to find he'd gone with the expensive Italian leather interior. It felt cold and stiff against me as I edged inside. Chaz ran around the long hood and piled into the driver's seat, put the car in gear, and scratched gravel out onto the road again.

When the speedometer was pegged at eighty, he pulled a deep breath and said, "Look, you have a nasty bump on the head; maybe you imagined-"

"Bullshit."

"Hey, give me a chance here, honey-"

I held out a shaking finger at him. "Not your honey, and the next time you give me some name like baby or sweetheart I'm going to kick your ass so hard you can read your underwear label. Got me?"

He was silent. Typed a message on the steering wheel in urgent Morse code. Finally nodded.

"Who was he?" I asked.

"I don't know."

"I hate to repeat myself, but ass? Underwear label? I know you were manipulating the weather out there to drive off aerial surveillance. Drugs, right? He was making some kind of drug deal."