The tendrils withdrew into the sheath of Phaedra’s aura. Her lips parted and her eyes looked into the faraway.
To deepen the hypnosis, I grasped both of her hands and massaged the webs of flesh between the thumbs and index fingers. I could’ve fanged her but I didn’t want my mouth close to her skin. Enough creeps had taken advantage of her and I didn’t want to be on that list.
Her hands had smooth, unblemished adolescent skin. Her fingernails were ragged from where she’d been chewing on them.
To verify what Phaedra had told me, I went through the items she’d mentioned. Her name. The Huntington’s. The details between Gino and herself. How much she knew of her family’s criminal pursuits. What about the source of her psychic powers?
It was all as she’d originally told me.
And the zombies? She had no knowledge of zombies except to call them “the others.” Those between the living and the dead. Like me. But different. Good, I didn’t want to be confused with zombies.
It’s a crapshoot with hypnosis. When you go deep into the subconscious there’s all kinds of junk cluttering the mind. Sometimes you get right to the “truth,” like with Phaedra. Other times, sifting for answers was like dredging through mud, and there were the instances where you got a subject who gushed like a broken faucet.
I ordered Phaedra to sleep while I kept kneading her hands. Her head tipped forward and her breathing became heavy.
I let go of her hands and replaced my contacts.
“On three, wake up,” I said. “One.” I brushed back a wet curl that fell across her face. “Two.” I settled into my seat. “Three.”
Phaedra’s right eye twitched. She blinked and looked around the interior of the 4Runner.
“You okay?” I asked.
Phaedra checked the front of her jacket. Her expression turned cross. “What did you do?”
“Nothing.”
“Bullshit.”
“You think you know about vampires? Then if you’re with a vampire, you gotta expect all kinds of weird shit. But I didn’t touch you if that’s what you want to know.”
Phaedra fumed, angry and perplexed.
I put the shift lever into drive. “Do you want to help me find Gino or should I take you back into town?”
She slugged from her bottle. “I’m no chickenshit. Let’s go to Gino’s.”
I angled from the shoulder and onto the asphalt. “How close are we?”
“Keep going. Past the wooden fences. I’ll tell you when.”
The mountain pressed against us from the right. To the left, the bottom of the valley widened and narrowed as the stream meandered through aspen thickets. Dense clusters of yellow leaves clumped around the pale, straight trunks. In the flat areas along the stream sat houses, ranging from Airstreams on blocks, to log cabins with porches and garages, to expensive ranchettes with horses and corrals.
White wooden fences bounded the more imposing properties. The white fences became ordinary wood, then simple straight posts holding up wire. After a while, the posts turned crooked and the tangled wire fencing appeared as if it had been scrounged from a salvage yard.
Phaedra sat up and brought her face closer to the windshield. Her breath fogged the glass for an instant before evaporating. “Go past the barn, then take a left at the first dirt road past the fence.”
Clouds sank between the mountains like big wet blankets and drenched the air with a steady drizzle.
A red barn loomed out of the mist. Muddy tracks veered off the asphalt. I slowed down.
“Wrong road,” Phaedra said. “Keep going past the fence.”
I gave the Toyota a little pedal but kept the speed low. I didn’t want to lose the fence as scrub bushes hid the posts and thick mist camouflaged the barbed wire.
Phaedra gave a heads-up about the fence line. The strands of barbed wire became slack and disappeared into the weeds.
The ground on the left dropped abruptly and an arrangement of rocks marked the entrance of a dirt road down the incline.
“This is it,” Phaedra said. She drew even closer to the windshield to peer over the left fender.
I halted for a moment. The asphalt here was clean, indicating no one had recently come onto the county road. I didn’t see any fresh tire tracks in the mud going the other way. No one, it seemed, had been at or left Gino’s lately, by car anyway. I put the Toyota into four-wheel drive, just in case the ruts got deep.
Electric lines on tall poles ran parallel to the dirt road. We circled the northern border of the property with the red barn. The road cut through a grove of junipers to a flat stretch of mud and grass. Yellow aspen peeked from behind the dark green junipers.
Phaedra pointed ahead. “That’s it.”
A long one-story house sat on the right side with Gino’s silver Titan pickup parked next to it.
Overlapping siding painted pastel yellow covered the building. A gray satellite dish pointed up from the corner of the roof closest to us. Water dripped over the tops of the rusted gutters. The place reminded me of government housing on an Indian reservation.
I slowed to a crawl and thought about putting Phaedra under again so I could scope the area sans contacts. But if I kept hypnotizing her, she’d wonder about the gaps in her memory and lose trust in me.
The house looked deserted. I halted the Toyota and paused. I put my sixth sense on maximum gain and detected nada.
Phaedra chewed on a fingernail. “Gino should be here.”
“Does he live alone?”
“Yeah, mostly. Sometimes his friends crash and he’s got girls spending the night.”
“Maybe he’s at their houses?”
Phaedra shrugged.
I couldn’t be as complacent. This started because of a zombie. Gino contacted me to investigate the details behind the mutilations and deaths of his riffraff comrades. Now I was here and Gino was missing.
I eased alongside the Titan. Phaedra didn’t wait for me to stop before popping the door. As soon as the Toyota quit rolling, she sprang out and circled for the front of the house.
I palmed my H&K.45 and got out. This time, I see a zombie, I’m going to pump him so full of lead he could be used as ballast on a freighter.
I stood for a moment and absorbed the ambience. The fog muffled noise and added a melancholy texture to the afternoon. I sniffed damp earth and the faint scent of a cedar fire from a distant chimney. I focused my sixth sense like a ray and scanned the building, the road, the surrounding tree line, the open grassy area to my right, the wall of mountain behind us. Everything seemed normal.
Phaedra cupped her hands against the front window and peered inside. Her breath fogged the glass. She wiped the spot clean and peered again. She backed away and shook her head. No Gino.
I tried the aluminum screen door at the entrance. Locked. I gave the knob an extra twist and broke the deadbolt. The main door was also locked.
Phaedra dragged a plastic milk crate under the window. She stood on the crate and jimmied open the sliding glass window. Moving quick as a squirrel, she levered one leg over the windowsill and tumbled inside.
Me and my vampire superpowers remained outside, still screwing with the door.
Phaedra screamed.