Chill Factor

Charles Spenser Ashworth III's smooth, radio-announcer voice. Please leave a message and I'll get back to you. If you're a single lady, I'll get back to you sooner. Oh, he just oozed charm. Or maybe just oozed. I left him a businesslike message that said I'd arrived, where I was, and that I expected him to meet me as soon as possible.

It was white-hot outside when I walked in through those automatic doors at the Holiday Inn. I was wearing a white pantsuit, and a neon-yellow halter top under the jacket. Kicky yellow shoes. The outfit was disappointingly pedigree-free, but then I was on a budget, saving up for couture in the future. It was still big-city enough to draw looks.

I trundled my sturdy wheeled travel case up to the counter and booked a room. Cooled my heels in my new temporary home, flipping TV channels and trying to figure out why all hotel pillows are either too hard or too soft. Two hours later, the hotel phone rang.

Chaz was in the lobby.

I descended the somewhat rickety steps, past the fountain, and there he was. Unmistakably a Chaz, not a Charles. Tall, solidly muscular, deeply tanned, with wavy dark hair and sparkling blue eyes. An artificially white smile, perfect teeth. He looked like he belonged out in Hollywood, hanging poolside, especially considering the casual Polo shirt and Dockers, loafers without socks. Altogether too preppy, but I wasn't going to hold that against him.

Much.

He looked me up and down in blatant appraisal- not the usual fast I-shouldn't-be-doing-this-but-I-can't-help-it appraisal that polite men tend to give, but the kind that ought to be reserved for Friday nights around closing time at the strip club. His stare centered on my breasts. Okay, I know, don't wear the halter top if you don't want the attention, but jeez, it was 120 in the shade. Bulky turtlenecks were right out.

'Joanne? I was expecting you to wait for me in Las Vegas. I was coming into town later.' He didn't wait for my response. He captured my hand and gave me an extravagant kiss on the back of it, staring deep into my eyes the whole time. 'Charmed.'

'Mr. Ashworth-'

'Chaz, please. Really, you wasted a trip; this is just where I have my country house.' He made it sound like he was a landowner back in the old country, titled and bursting with noblesse oblige. 'Honey-'

'Joanne.' Two could play the interrupting game, and I'd already had it up to here with Mr. Charm. 'Please refer to me by name, if you don't mind.'

He flashed me a smile that was too toothy to be apologetic. 'Joanne, yes, of course. Sorry. Look, there's just no reason for the Wardens to send somebody all the way out here. No deep, dark secrets in the attic. Not that I'm not thrilled to have your company.'

I reclaimed my hand. 'I'll be needing your records.'

'Certainly.' Another toothpaste-ad smile. 'But they're back in the city.'

'You don't keep anything at your country house? Seems like you spend quite a bit of time here.' I spread out the folder on the counter and found the maps I was looking for. 'When I mapped the weather patterns, it sure looked as if a lot of the manipulation occurs from this location, not from Las Vegas. So it stands to reason that you'd have an office here, wouldn't you? If you're keeping proper records.'

He lost the smile. 'I haven't got anything to hide.'

My Aunt Fanny! From every note in the file, everybody knew there was something weird out here, but the prior three auditors sent to investigate hadn't found a thing. My mission was to investigate and find something to bust his ass, so that there could be a formal inquiry, and he could be removed from duty.

Protocol. Even in the supernatural business, you have to follow strict human resources procedures.

'Then you won't mind if I audit the records at your home office,' I said.

'I don't have a-'

'Chaz,' I interrupted, and held on to a thin, don't-screw-with-me smile. 'I know you have a home office. Let's not spend more time on that, okay?'

He didn't look happy.

'Let's go,' I said, before he could throw out any more lame pickup lines, and led the way out to the Jaguar.

I kept silent all the way out to his house, a good half hour's drive even at excessively indulgent speeds. I virtuously resisted the urge to smack him, which surely must qualify me for some kind of sainthood… believe me, he was annoying. I could easily see why they'd sequestered him out here in the middle of nowhere. Mouthy, hyperactively on the make, shallow, and none too smart. I couldn't tell how talented he was, but even the biggest store of power in the world wouldn't make him a good Warden.

And then I realized that I could also be accused of being shallow, hyperactively on the make, and mouthy. I hoped I was smart, though. Smarter, anyway.

We turned off on a paved road and passed under a big wrought-iron gate decorated with-I'm not kidding-the chromed silhouette of a nude woman, the exact copy of what you see on taste-free truckers' mud flaps. The name over the entrance was FANTASY RANCH. Oh, yeah, this was going to be fun.

The house was an overdone Tudor style, ridiculous out here on the prairie. There was a struggling, desperately green lawn in front that looked suspiciously like it might have been freshly spray painted. A garage with three cars, all crap-year Corvettes. All red, of course. In the corner, a gold pimp-trim Cadillac Seville, maroon.

He kept chatting me up all the way up the front walk, but I wasn't listening; I was looking into the aetheric. Oversight gives you a nice lay of the land, particularly since there's a fourth-dimensional time layer to it that represents the past. The history of Chaz's pad was nothing to be proud of. On the aetheric, the place showed its true character. A shell of a place, barely there… overlaid with shadows. That was kind of sad. Even the place where he lived didn't make much of an impression on the world.

Neither did Chaz himself. People tended to manifest on the aetheric in visual representations of their self- image; his looked pretty much like a sad, faded image of his physical form. I wondered what he saw when he looked at me. People tended to get the oddest expressions.

Well, the only good news was that Chaz wasn't likely to be a serial killer, not with a basically boring aetheric presence like this. Not that I couldn't defend myself, but it was nice not to have to worry about it. I had plenty of other things on my mind.

His house was self-consciously tacky-retro-seventies without any semblance of a cool factor. He made reference to the water bed. I shut him down and made it clear that I expected to be shown to the home office.

It was at the back of the house, and it looked like he'd set it up from some office catalog rather than to suit any kind of actual work process; everything was expensive, but nothing was very good. The filing cabinet was some exotic handcrafted wood, but the drawers stuck. Inside, there was a chaos of unmarked folders, piles of haphazard papers, crap mixed in with vital documents. I'd heard he hadn't filed quarterly reports in a year; they were probably here, stuffed in with downloaded porn photos. The records I found… well, threadbare would have been a generous description.

After two hours I was ready to scream and blow the whole place away with a tornado. Instead-reminding myself that I was a professional, dammit-I grabbed and boxed up everything that looked remotely interesting, while Chaz's smile got thinner and thinner, and wrote him out a receipt for what I'd taken.

The Jag's trunk was roomy. I got six boxes in there, added the remaining four to the backseat, and headed back to the hotel.

Time to settle in with room service tuna salad and pay per-view movies while I struggled through the paperwork.

It was going to be a long, long audit.

I drifted back to the present, and realized that instead of lulling myself to sleep I was lying in the dark, staring up at the ceiling and watching rain patterns ripple across the spackle. The light out in the parking lot was a bright blue-white, like sustained lightning.

I considered doing something about the rain, but so long as it didn't develop into something devastating, I decided to let it ride. There were Weather Wardens aplenty roaming around the country; the Wardens Association was on the verge of chaos, what with the senior leadership being dead and all hell breaking loose out here in the desert. I was here with a specific job, and I ought to concentrate on it.