Windfall

He put two fingers on my lips to hush me. “I should be here,” he said, and replaced fingers with his mouth, a warm, liquidly intimate kiss that melted me into butter-warm contentment from the inside out. There was tongue, and hands sliding under the sheets, and oh my God, it was nice. My sleepy nerve endings came awake with an electric hum.

Outside, the rain was still falling, a steady whisper against the glass, and it reminded me that I had an hour before I had to shower and drive to the studio to be humiliated again by Marvelous Marvin and his horse’s-ass predictions that seemed way too lucky to be true.

“I have to get up soon,” I said, and worked my way down his bare chest with slow, damp circles of my lips and tongue, over the trembling, velvet-warm planes of his stomach…

I heard the breath come out of him in a slow, moaning rush.

“Then we should hurry,” he whispered, and stroked the curls from my hair.

In the morning—well, the predawn darkness—the rain finally stopped just in time for me to pull into the parking lot. My carefully straightened hair looked glossy and gorgeous when I checked it in the mirror; I did makeup fast, forbade Genevieve to backcomb anything on me, and then got a look at the outfit she had hanging on the rack next to the door.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. She shrugged massive, muscular shoulders.

“Oh, God, I’ll pay you money if you say you’re kidding.”

“You can’t afford me, darling,” she said, and lit up a Marlboro. There was no smoking in here. She never had cared. I held my breath and got out of the chair to take my costume off the hanger, and held it up to the light.

Apparently, Marvin’s prediction was going to be su

“No,” I said. “I’m not wearing this. Tell Marvin—”

“Tell me what?” Marvin walked up and threw a heavy arm around my shoulders, leaned in, and looked down my shirt. He smelled like bad cologne and breath mints and a sour aftertaste of alcohol left over from the night before. His hair implants still looked like seedlings, but he’d cover them up with the toupee before going on the air, Visine the reddened eyes, and do a quick white-up on his teeth. Marvin knew television the way other, better meteorologists knew their way around a satellite graphic. “What’s wrong? Don’t like the outfit? Should have come to breakfast with me yesterday, heh heh.”

I forced a smile and reminded myself that I needed a job, and this one paid better than working the register at the 7-Eleven, with a slightly smaller chance of being robbed. “I’d rather not wear it,” I said. And tried to sound professional about it. “How about something else? Something less—”

“Kids love Su

The jovial tone wasn’t fooling me; his eyes were mean and bright, and he wasn’t taking no for an answer. The news director, a harried young guy by the name of Michael, wasn’t going to be taking any moral stand against foam rubber, and so far as I knew, there was no Weathergirl Union to protect me from this crime against fashion.

“Fine,” I said, and forced a smile. “No problem.”

He winked, swear to God. He did.

I had to sincerely fight the impulse to cha

The segment went about as badly as I could ever hope. My lines were stupid, the foam rubber sun suit was hot, Marvin was obnoxious, and Cherise was notoriously absent from the moral support trenches. They threw more water on me, this time to warn of some unusually big waves. One of the stagehands giggled.

As I was stripping off the sticky, sweaty tights, Genevieve took time off from her smoke break to toss me a towel and say, “You know, you’re better than he deserves. You actually make him look good. Me, I’d forget my lines and throw up on him.” She raised an overplucked eyebrow significantly and flicked her Bic on a fresh cancer stick.

I dropped the damp tights into the laundry basket—three points—and wriggled my toes in the ecstasy of freedom. “Would that work?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said. “Worked for the last two girls. Well, okay, one of them went postal and beat him with a rubber fish. But actually, ratings went up, so maybe it’s not such a good idea to go that direction, especially with the fish. Hey, you know what? Your hair looks good. You ought to take a beach day. It’s supposed to be su

We both laughed, and I smacked palms with her and left her to backcomb the noon anchorwoman into submission.

The weather was clearing in the east, but as I stood and felt the wind, I knew that it wouldn’t stay that way; another wave of damp, cool air was moving in over the ocean, and the collision with the existing high-pressure system was going to drive more clouds. Rain today. Rain tomorrow, probably. Sunshine, my ass. Marvin had to be wrong, or else he had a Warden in his back pocket. But who? Not me, obviously. And since the local office here was run by John Foster, one of the few truly honest Wardens I’d ever known, I couldn’t see it. But John had a flaw. He trusted people, until they let him down.

I wondered if I should start seriously looking around for the culprit. In self-defense.

You have power, I reminded myself. You can call storms and lightning and water. You can kick ass if necessary. Yeah, and get my ass dragged in for a magical lobotomy for my troubles. Not a good situation. I was too aware of what Lewis had said. I hadn’t used my powers at all, and even so, the Wardens were turning against me. If I used them now, even in self-defense…

As I rounded the corner heading for my car, I spotted a depressingly familiar white van. It was sequined with leftover rain that glittered orange in the rising sun.

Dammit.

Rodriguez was sitting in the driver’s seat, eating the last crumbs of a Danish.

He had a tiny little LCD television plugged into the lighter on the dashboard, tuned to WXTV. He’d been watching—and no doubt enjoying—my morning’s humiliation as Su

Somehow, that didn’t make me feel any better.

“Having a good time?” I asked him. He wiped Danish from his mouth with a napkin, licked his lips, and sipped coffee. “Because this is getting old. Go home. I can’t tell you anything.”

“Sure you can,” he said. “Hop in. Explain to me how you knew Tommy Qui

“This is a waste of time. Yours and mine both.”

“Well, I’m on extended leave, so my time is my own,” he said. “And about your time, I don’t particularly give a shit. You are going to talk to me. Sooner or later.”

I was tired, pissed off, and felt violated by the morning in general; nothing like being the foam rubber butt of bad jokes to put you in a great mood to start the day. But even more than that, I was just tired. I felt… heavy. Exhausted. Gray.

And maybe that was why I made the snap decision to shoot my mouth off.

“Fine,” I snapped. “Thomas Qui

Rodriguez had gone still and very, very cold, watching me. Cop-cold, with a human fury burning somewhere underneath.

“Tommy was a good man,” he said with deliberate calm. “A good cop. Good husband, and a good father.” The fury underneath burned its way to the surface. “I saw him pull a six-month-old baby out of a burning building and puke his guts out when it died in his arms. You don’t know a fucking thing. He was a good man.”