John Lutz - Pulse

“Murder?”

“Maybe. Hard to say for sure, with the encryption. Or Professor Pratt might have been talking about a teaching project. She had a file stuffed with newspaper items about some old murders. We discuss that kind of thing in her class all the time.”

“So who was the killer?” Quinn asked.

“Daniel something.”

“Daniel Danielle? Last name a female version of the first?”

Jody slapped her forehead so hard her springy red hair jiggled. “Of course! It should have registered. Only this guy died like over a decade ago.”

Quinn looked at Pearl. Pearl looked at Quinn and Jody. All of them thinking this could be a coincidence, Professor Pratt researching for her class presentation the same killer who appeared to have returned and taken up where he’d left off when he’d supposedly died ten years ago. After all, Daniel Danielle was a topical subject again. Fair game for a psych teacher.

“Coincidences do happen,” Jody said, “or there wouldn’t be such a word.”

“What are you going to do with your information?” Quinn asked.

“Try to stop demolition somehow on Mildred Dash’s apartment.”

“You mean calling the shots because you might have something on Enders and Coil?”

“Possibly.”

“Leverage?”

“Maybe.”

“Extortion?”

“I’m not gaining anything.”

“Blackmail?”

“I wouldn’t call it that.”

“What would you call it?”

“Preventing something criminal. Do either of you know anything about it?”

“I don’t,” Pearl said.

“We don’t,” Quinn added.

“Okay.”

Quinn and Pearl sat staring at each other. They both felt as if they’d just been spewed from a conversational whirlpool.

Jody smiled and stood up from her chair. “Is it my turn to help with the dishes?”

“It’s your turn to do the dishes,” Pearl said.

“That’s right.” Jody began collecting the paper plates and plastic utensils supplied by the restaurant and delis.

Off she went into the kitchen, almost tripping over the cat still intent on its ice cream.

Pearl hadn’t moved. She was gazing toward the kitchen, looking solemn and concerned.

“Your kid,” Quinn said.

P earl shouldn’t have followed Jody the next morning, but she did.

Things were accumulating in a way that made her uneasy. Who was this Sarah Benham woman, and what was the basis of her friendship with Jody? What might Jody do to get herself into the kind of trouble that would follow her all her life? Pearl suspected her daughter wasn’t far from going to the demolition site of Mildred Dash’s apartment and causing a problem. Youth often thought that if enough hell was raised, a solution would be forthcoming.

Why was Jody so discontented? Such a pea under the mattress? Pearl thought about Jody’s father. He’d been, if anything, too mellow. It had been as if his music sweetened his life. Even more than Pearl had sweetened it. He had always been too preoccupied to get into the various kinds of trouble that seemed to attract Jody. Where the hell did Jody get-?

Pearl put the question out of her mind so she could concentrate on what she was doing. Following her daughter, as any good mother would.

Ahead of her, Jody paused to look at some junk in a street vendor’s cart. T-shirts, caps, belts, paste jewelry, silver and gold chains, sunglasses, and visors-the gaudy display seemed to sway in the morning breeze. Or maybe that was an illusion.

Pearl moved over to a florist shop doorway, out of the stream of pedestrian traffic. While she watched her daughter absently pick through the street vendor’s merchandise, she was thinking Okay, or No, no, don’t buy that.

Mom interfering by telepathy.

Jody did buy something. Apparently some small piece of jewelry. Then she walked on.

As Pearl followed, Jody broke into a jog in order to join a knot of people hurrying across an intersection with the traffic signal.

Uh-oh.

Pearl knew she’d have to jog to keep up, maybe cross over the other way and keep pace on the opposite side of the street. If traffic would cooperate.

All she could see of Jody now was her head of springy red hair. She decided her best bet would be to reach the intersection where Jody had crossed and see if she could catch a break in the traffic.

Pearl thought she might make it and was approaching the curb when a large shadow engulfed her. She slowed, glanced back, and saw that one of those red double-decker sightseeing buses was about to make a right turn in front of her.

She slowed to a walk, giving ground to the behemoth.

When she was almost at a stop, something rammed into the small of her back and shoved her from behind.

She was in front of the turning bus.

Pearl instinctively brought up her hands and slapped at the front of the bus with both palms. She pushed away from the warm wall of metal as the bus came at her. It wasn’t moving fast, but fast enough that she couldn’t get out of its path. She was in so close she wasn’t sure if the driver was even aware of her.

Her palms were stinging, her locked elbows straining, as she backpedaled and tried to hold the bus at bay.

Don’t fall, don’t fall, don’t fall…!

Her maneuver worked, but not for long. She found herself falling. There were shouts, the hissing of air brakes.

Someone or something had her left upper arm in a strong grip and yanked her sideways and away, as the bus hissed and squealed to a stop.

Pearl lay limp on the pavement, breathing in the smells of oil and heat and exhaust fumes. She saw that one of the bus’s tires was only inches from her twisted right leg. People were gathered around her, trying to help, touching her almost everywhere in order to reassure themselves, and her, that she was alive and not dead or seriously injured.

Pearl brushed them away and managed to get to her feet, leaning against the stopped bus for support.

Standing, squinting, she looked around her. Somebody had given her the extra few inches of pavement she needed in order to survive. Whoever had grabbed her arm and pulled her to the side had saved her life.

She looked at the stunned, silent faces, and knew no one.

Then a hand touched her shoulder and she heard a familiar voice.

“You okay?”

Pearl’s savior, Nancy Weaver.

The killer had a way of moving at a near run on a crowded sidewalk without attracting attention. He’d pushed Pearl slightly harder than he’d intended, and she’d almost been killed. He hadn’t wanted her dead; he needed her alive-at least for a while longer.

Fortunately some other woman, very much alert, had kept Pearl from perishing beneath the wheels of the bus. The killer smiled. That wasn’t Pearl’s fate at all. He would decide that.

This was a message to Quinn as well as to Pearl: Anything could happen any time, anywhere, to anyone. But they already knew that. Brakes could hiss, tires screech on concrete, and then Wham! And it’s a different world.

The message, a simple reminder: My choice.

“I had my choice,” Weaver said, later at Q amp;A. “I could save Pearl and make sure she was all right, or I could go after whoever pushed her.”

Pearl was sitting in her desk chair, bent forward and holding a damp washcloth on her knee where she’d skinned it. The knee had tiny bits of asphalt in it and stung like hell. Pearl was getting sore all over, the way it was sometimes after an auto accident. She was grateful for what Weaver had done, but anger and humiliation were also in her jumble of emotions.

Weaver must have been tailing her.

Then she thought about what almost happened and her anger paled.

Someone tried to kill me.

The others, Quinn, Fedderman, Sal, and Harold, were listening and watching the two women.