“Had a feelin’,” she said. She hadn’t lived in Texas since childhood but the laid-back accent still clung to every word she spoke.
Petra’s intuition, like Wayne’s ability to take down a target with an impossibly long-range rifle shot, was well above normal. Actually, it could only be described as paranormal.
Both Wayne and Petra were mid-range sensitives; both had retired from the same no-name agency. Petra had been Wayne’s spotter in the days when Wayne had worked as a sniper. Together they had formed a lethal team. They had also become another kind of team—partners for life.
Petra was a sturdily built woman in her early sixties. She wore her long gray hair in a braid down her back. A badly yellowed chef ’s toque sat squarely atop her head. A gold ring glinted in one ear. While Wayne carried a concealed gun in an ankle holster, Petra favored a knife; a big one. She kept it in a sheath beneath her long apron.
“I’ve got it handled,” Luther said.
“Right.” Petra nodded once and stalked back into the hot kitchen.
Luther tapped his way across the tiled floor. The overall level of tension in the room was rising fast. The crowd was getting restless. The study of parapsychology had been thoroughly discredited by the modern scientific establishment. Because of that, a lot of folks went through their entire lives ignoring, suppressing or remaining willfully oblivious to the psychic side of their natures. But in situations like this, even those with normal sensitivity found themselves looking around for the nearest exit well before they had registered exactly what was wrong. The crowd at the Rainbow was anything but normal.
Flower Shirt didn’t seem to be aware of Luther or the restless energy of the regulars. He was too busy poking at Crazy Ray with a sharp, verbal stick.
“Hey, Surfer Bum,” he said loudly. “You make a good living screwing female tourists? How much do you charge the ladies for a peek at your little surfboard?”
Ray ignored him. He continued to sit hunched over his beer, munching steadily on his deep-fried fish and fries. He had the broad-shouldered build and the burned-in tan of a man who spends his days riding the waves. His lanky brown hair had been bleached by the sun. Couldn’t blame Flower Shirt for picking the wrong target, Luther thought. Ray didn’t look crazy, not unless you could see his aura.
“What’s the matter?” Flower Shirt said. “Got a problem answering a simple question? Where’s that aloha spirit I’m always hearing so much about?”
Ray put down his beer and started to turn. Luther jacked up his senses until he could see the auras of those around him. Light and dark reversed but not in the way they did in a photographic negative. When he was running hot like this the colors he viewed were anything but black and white. The hues came from various points along the paranormal spectrum. There were no words to describe them. Energy pulsed and flared and spiked around every person in the vicinity.
The growing tension had been palpable to his normal senses, but perceived through his parasenses, it had already escalated into a flood tide of dangerously swirling currents.
The brief moment of vertigo that always accompanied the shift in perception evaporated between one step and the next. He was accustomed to the short flash of acute disorientation. He had been living with his talent since he had come into it in his early teens.
He concentrated on Ray first. Flower Shirt was the most obnoxious person within range but Ray was the most unpredictable. The seething, barely controlled craziness showed clearly in the murky hues and erratic pulses of his aura. The most alarming stuff took the shape of sickly, greenish-yellow filaments that flashed and disappeared in no discernible pattern. The tendrils gathered strength rapidly as Ray’s frail grasp on reality started to weaken. He slid rapidly into his uniquely paranoid universe.
“Keep away from me,” Ray said softly.
A smart man, hearing that voice, would have backed off immediately, but Flower Shirt grinned, unaware that he was about to let a very unstable, unpredictable genie out of its bottle.
“Don’t worry, Surfer Bum,” he said. “The last thing I want to do is get too close to you. Might catch whatever diseases you picked up from those tourists you service.”
Ray started to rise, muscled shoulders bunching beneath his ripped T-shirt. Luther was less than two feet away now. He concentrated on the unwholesome greenish-yellow spikes of energy that snapped and cracked in Ray’s aura. With exquisite precision—mistakes often had extremely unpleasant consequences—he generated a wave of suppressing energy from his own aura. The pulses resonated with Ray’s in a counterpoint pattern. The green-yellow tendrils of energy weakened visibly.
Ray blinked a few times and frowned in confusion. Luther tweaked his aura a little more. With a sigh, Ray lost interest in Aloha Shirt. Suddenly exhausted, he sank back down into his chair.
“Why don’t you finish your beer?” Luther said to him. “I’ll take care of this.”
“Yeah, sure.” Ray looked at the bottle on the table. “My beer.”
Grateful for direction in the midst of the overwhelming ennui, he picked up the bottle and took a long swallow.
Deprived of his prey, Flower Shirt reacted with spiraling rage. His face scrunched up into a snarl. He leaned to one side and peered around Luther.
“Hey, I’m talking to you, Surfer Asshole,” he yelled at Ray.
“No,” Luther said, using the same low voice he had employed with Ray. “You’re talking to me. We’re discussing the fact that you would like to leave now.”
Flower Shirt’s aura was a lot more stable than Ray’s. That was the good news. The bad news was that the colors were those of frustration and fury.
The politically correct view of bullies was that they suffered from low self-esteem and tried to compensate by making other people their victims. As far as Luther was concerned, that was pure bull. Guys like Flower Shirt felt superior to others and lacked all traces of empathy. Bullies bullied not out of some unconscious desire to try to compensate for their low self-esteem. They did it because they could and because they enjoyed it.
The only way to stop a bully was to scare him. The species had a strong sense of self-preservation.
There was nothing tricky or mysterious about the wavelengths of energy in Flower Shirt’s pattern. The hot rush of the man’s unchecked lust for verbal abuse spiked and pulsed very clearly. Luther generated the suppressing patterns. The compelling urge to hurt and dominate Ray died instantly beneath the heavy, crushing weight of exhaustion but Flower Shirt was already on his feet, turning his attention to Luther.