Steal the Lightning: A Field Ops Novel (Field Ops #3)(26)

She found that funny, too.



“I got you sent here. Or, I helped.”

Silverman was drunk. He’d got drunk very quickly, and he’d kept on drinking.

This latest snippet, though, was just a little bit too much.

I said, “So you’re—what? Some big deal at the Registry now? News to me.”

“No, no. But I talk to people, lots of people, it’s what I do, and I was telling someone, talking about what was happening here. And other places, too. Vegas, I’ve heard stories about Vegas—”

“We’re not in Vegas. Not going, either.”

“Big Hollow, though. They had it marked already. I mean, you couldn’t miss it, but I let them know the full . . . extent of the activity, and I sort of said, if you were heading this way . . .”

“And we—what? Arrived at the same time? Just by coincidence?”

“Um, no. Obviously not. But the Registry, see, it can’t keep track of everything. And if I can help out—”

“And why would you do that?”

“Mutual interest. You do your job, I get my movie. Now—” He pushed his chair back, stumbled to his feet. “My round, right? You want more drinks, don’t you? I’m buying . . .”



“He’s an idiot. Or he’s a genius. I don’t know which.”

We were alone, back at the motel. Alone, and drunk.

She said, “I sort of like him.”

“Oh, he’s likeable, all right. Sort of.”

“You don’t agree?”

“I don’t think he knows what he’s messing with. And when people don’t know what they’re doing, they should leave it to the ones who do.”

“Which is you, I suppose?”

“In this case, I suppose so.”

I lay back on the bed.

“You,” she said. “Not me.”

I didn’t answer.

“That wasn’t rhetorical,” she told me.

“I didn’t say not you.”

“But you meant it.”

Her voice was small and hard, and she was staring straight at me.

I knew the danger signs. And I remembered what her dad had said.

Melody was wrong: if anything was going to drive a wedge between us, it wasn’t culture, and it wasn’t race. It was Angel’s own damn stubbornness, and her willingness to batter down whatever obstacles she thought were in her way.

Including me.

I said, “We can’t do this one.”

I said, “I’ll phone it in, explain what’s going on. No big deal. It happens.”

I said, “There’ll be others. Something different. You know?”

“I’m training, Chris. It doesn’t matter what it is. I need to do it. Right?”

“There’s people. There’s people here—”

“But you’ve done jobs like that. You told me so.”

“Plus, it’s water. That’s tricky. Rare, as well. Chances are you’ll never need to know . . .”

“And if I do? What then? Oh, this is the bit Chris wouldn’t show me?”

“It’s not good to train on. Water and electric—”

I was drunk, stumbling over words, trying to explain to her. But I could see it all: every pitfall, every danger, every chance for things to fall apart. Even laying cables was a problem. How could we see what we were doing? Or get a sense of where the god was weak and strong? In water, everything was mobile. Everything changed. And if we laid the cables, the moment that we sent a charge through, the water would just spread it out, in all directions. Maybe favoring the surface. Maybe not. Any hidden object—a drainage pipe, or an old chunk of wreckage—anything could act as an earth, and change the whole dynamics. There were too many unknowns. Too much that couldn’t be predicted.

And I doubted Cleary’s mob were going to want us near the place, just to make it harder.

I said, “One misstep, anywhere—one little accident. If it goes wrong . . .”

“Well then,” she said. “Best make sure it doesn’t, hadn’t we?”





Chapter 24

The Limo




The crows out in the field were laughing at me.

Angel handed me a coffee, one of those tiny motel cups that’s gone in just a couple of gulps.

“Feel rough?” she said.

I felt like someone, sometime in the night, had taken out my brain to use for football practice.

“You were there, too,” I complained. “How come you’re so chirpy?”

“’Cause I stopped, didn’t I? While you and your pal were going at it.”

She pulled a shirt on.

“But I do know a cure,” she said.

“This isn’t that banana thing, is it . . . ?”

“Uh-uh. Better.” She picked up her purse. “Taco Bell. Right across the parking lot. Cure any hangover, I swear.”

“Right now,” I told her, “I’ll try anything.”

The parking lot was a hundred yards in sharp, fierce sun.

Even with my dark glasses, I wasn’t sure that I could make it . . .



“This is the best fake Mexican that you will ever eat,” she said, ordering breakfast burritos, cheesy potatoes, coffee, and snatching up a dozen packs of hot sauce while I slumped at a table by the window. “It’s a cuisine all of its own. There’s nothing like it.”