quietly in the background. Before Tauber could answer, she started retreating to the kitchen. “Let me get you some water-I’m sure you’re thirsty.”
“We’re fine,” Max said but she was gone for just a few seconds, returning with a pitcher and glasses on a tray. Nobody took any.
“Dave Monaghan’s dead,” Tauber answered finally. Fine lowered her eyes and took a breath, slow and deep. She daubed at her forehead a couple times.
“How?” she said.
“Shot dead in Florida yesterday.”
“How do you know?” she asked, which struck me as an odd question.
“We were there,” I said, indicating Max and me. “They shot him through the bathroom window and then they blew up the house.”
“Who did?” she asked and I wondered why she was asking questions, with words. She was in the program, wasn’t she? Couldn’t she just read our minds? Maybe the other two were blocking her, which seemed kind of odd too. Or maybe she felt a need, for some reason, to hear their answers aloud.
“Two mindbenders,” Max answered. “Minor league, less than. 5 on the Kirlian scale. We met them half an hour later trying to go through Dave’s office.” Fine’s eyes widened.
“What happened to them?” she asked. “Did they-could they tell you anything?”
“They didn’t know enough to tell,” Max said. “But they came in an expensive SUV under suggestion with after-action forms to fill out and phone numbers to report to.”
“Did you get the phone numbers?”
“They’re useless,” Max shrugged. “You get a recorded message that asks for the extension you wish to dial.” He and Fine had a kind of staring contest going. “But they were clearly cogs in a pretty organized wheel.”
“Whose?”
“Can’t tell. They blocked well-no names or titles. Their thoughts were in English, so no language cues.”
“Did you dispose of them?” Miriam Fine said and I squirmed at the directness of the question. I squirmed a little more at being the only one in the room who seemed uncomfortable with it.
“I put them out overnight. They have to be up and around by now-and raising the alarm.”
“Which is why you’re here,” Fine said.
“Dave left a list of agents he felt should be contacted-he must have felt you were in danger.”
“That’s what you think?” Fine said, settling into a chair by the fireplace, smoothing her skirt under her, her eyes never leaving Max. “What is your plan?”
“My…plan?” Max stammered. “Just to follow Dave’s blueprint. Just…just to warn you.”
“Against what? Against whom?”
“Whoever killed Dave,” he answered, like it was pretty obvious-I thought it was. Fine stood up from her seat like the perfect hostess, like all this life-and-death stuff was getting in the way of her socializing.
“Does anyone want coffee?” she asked quietly.
“Tea?” I asked and Max shot me a look like I’d asked for a handgun.
“I really think we should get going,” Max said. “They have to be looking for us.”
“Oh?” Fine said, still smiling. “Are they lurking outside, waiting to attack?” She shivered theatrically.
“How can I tell?” Max said, sinking into a chair opposite her. “There’s so much static around here-you don’t notice it?” Fine just stared at him. “I’m not comfortable when I can’t tell what’s going on around me.”
“Well, I’m not comfortable running away without a good reason,” Fine answered, speaking slowly, biting each word off as if they came a la carte. “We don’t know why Dave was killed, we have no real reason-other than your unspecified fears-to feel endangered ourselves. You say he left you a list, you think you know what it means, this one here-” she waved her hand at me “-says he saw Dave die and the house blow up. Even if I grant all these things on faith, why should we go anywhere?”
“I have no facts to offer,” Max said, “but I sensed that these agents were low-level, low-status. They wanted the list but only to hand it over to someone well above their pay grade.”
“You sensed,” Fine repeated, the words a hiss. “In what way? Automatic writing? Ideagrams? Narrating out of a trance? Which process do you use?”
“I–I have my own approach,” Max said.
“I’m sure you do,” Fine said and turned, all at once, to me. “And you? You are?”
“I’m Greg-”
“Greg lived with Dave,” Max explained. “Dave had a group of veterans living with him, making the transition back to civilian life. Dave helped them…adjust.”
“That sounds like Dave,” Fine demeaned politely. Her eyes were on me. Her eyes glinted at me as though we shared a secret, a juicy one. She was an attractive, confident, well-organized person, someone who could help me, who could help us all get ourselves together. If she was in charge, we wouldn’t be running all over the map. “You saw him dead too, then,” she said.
“I saw him first.”
To Max: “You weren’t there?”
“I arrived late.”
Fine’s eyes were slitted, like Tauber’s had been. “How late?”
“Five, maybe seven minutes-that’s right, isn’t it?” he asked me.
“I think so,” I said, my cheeks reddening. “I…lost track of time.”
“You were under stress-that happens,” Miriam Fine said, smiling at me. She had a cup of tea for me, the way I liked it. I didn’t remember her leaving the room to get it but there it was. She was considerate that way, I could tell. She went out of her way for people. At least, she had for me-neither Max nor Tauber had anything to drink. She turned back to Max. “If you say you arrived late, does that mean you were on your way when it happened?”
Now there was something in the air-Max looked uncomfortable. “Dave warned me they were coming. When I first sensed them, I didn’t realize they were coming after him.”
Fine nodded. “You thought they were after you,” she cooed. “Because there’s always someone coming after you, isn’t there?” With each word, he shrank and she blossomed. His eyes seemed to shrivel into his head, the hollows under his thick eyebrows darker and deeper by the second.
“It’s not like that,” he said but we all knew it was. He’d already told us it was. Fine might be a bit of a tight- ass but she was the first together person I’d encountered since Dave got shot. She was smart and clean, she lived in a nice house in a respectable neighborhood, she had a regular life and a regular job. She had pictures on the wall and a desk with a big computer monitor and computerized paystubs from a real corporation, not a handwritten chickenscratch job that the bank teller looked at you sideways over. Miriam Fine was a corporation and I was traveling with a freak show. She had every reason to feel good about herself.
“I made a mistake,” Max conceded, shoulders slumped. “I left town and got thirty miles away before I realized they were after Dave. By the time I got back, it was too late.”
“So your method isn’t foolproof, it seems,” Fine said. “You aren’t Superman.”
“He’s pretty close,” Tauber said and that seemed to break the mood, at least shake it up. “He does things we never did.”
“Of course he does,” she said. “He can’t help himself. So you feel responsible-”
“To an extent, yes. Dave was my friend.”
“-and you’re going to make amends? By deciding the old team is in danger-based on what, you’ve no idea-and taking it upon yourself to be noble and save us?” Sarcasm dripped from her voice; the words seemed to hit him like blows.
But something must have struck him funny, too, because his head rose and he was watching Fine now the same way Tauber had been watching him, sizing her up as though he’d never seen her before. “Dave left a trail,” he said. “Based on the trail and the way it was presented and the feelings I got from it, I’m here. You know as well as I do that we can’t rationalize everything we know. I didn’t take anything on myself-Dave left me the list.”
“It seems to me he left Greg the list,” Fine said and Max turned immediately to Tauber, accusing.
“She got that out of your head,” he glared.
Tauber raised his arms in protest. “She’s my teammate,” he said. “I don’t block her.”
“So Greg’s the list,” Fine repeated and suddenly I felt that warm feeling in the back of my head again, though it wasn’t as sharp as before, more of a mellow, sympathetic feeling. It would be so nice to have someone looking
