Binding the Shadows (Arcadia Bell #3)(33)

“Any idea how his knack is able to do something like that?” I said, nodding to the gruesome scene across the street. “I’ve never known a telekenetic to be able to lift that much weight.”

She shook her head. “No telling with that kid.”

“Do you know where he lives?”

“He doesn’t live in town,” she said. “He’s from the suburbs, or somewhere on the coast. La Sirena, maybe.”

Damn. Finding a telekenetic teenage Earthbound in La Sirena . . . well, needle in haystack, and all that. But maybe Brenda saw the disappointment in my face, because she quickly added, “Wherever he lives, he spends a lot of time hanging out under the railroad bridge at the end of Monterrey Street with some other delinquents. I called the cops on them once to chase them out, but they all came back after a few days.”

“Brenda!” Her husband was Mr. Frowny Face again. If Lon shushed me like that all the time, I’d have to tell him where to stick it. Thank God for Lon’s quiet, laid-back ways and his ability to keep the husband occupied long enough for me to get what I needed.

Turning back to Brenda, I mouthed a thank-you right before her testy husband escorted her away. Monterrey Street. Didn’t know where that was, but GPS could find it. I started to tell Lon all about my discovery and suggest we try our luck hunting Telly when a car pulled up, brakes squealing. A blonde Earthbound jumped out. Police tried to stop her from running onto the crime scene.

“This is my house!” she yelled. And when she pushed the officer out of the way and saw the Road Runner, she made a horrible keening wail.

Lon grabbed my arm and tugged me from the chaos. “I can’t be here,” he said sharply as he marched me back to his parked car. It took me a few moments to realize from the pained look on his face that he was trying to disengage his knack. Sometimes when he’s steamrolled with a lot of strong emotions coming from too many people at once, he gets overwhelmed and has trouble tuning it all out. I could only imagine what he could hear right now—the confusion and anxiety of the crowd, the amped up intensity of the police, the mother’s grief. . . .

When we got back inside the SUV, he seemed to have put enough distance between his knack and the scene. “You okay?” I asked.

He shook his head and didn’t say anything more about it. Just started the engine and drove away.

Monterrey Street was a few blocks away, where the rich neighborhood petered off into middle-class, then suddenly connected to one of those sketchy, vaguely ominous pockets of the city that had been neglected for years. Lon slowed the SUV as I peered out my window, eyes following the old, disused railroad tracks that crept along the bridge in the distance. Couldn’t see much from here. It spanned what was once Monterrey Creek, according to GPS, but now looked like nothing more than a weed-infested ditch.

Lon stopped the car a half-block away. “I’m parking here,” he explained. “If this kid can lift cars, I don’t think I want to give him any weapons.”

I glanced around, doing my best to push down rising anxiety, wondering how much time we had before someone busted one of Lon’s windows to perform a little hot-wire surgery.

He patted the dash in answer to my worries. “Fort Knox.”

“What about Telly? What if he’s hanging out with some other Earthbounds who have amped-up knacks? We could be walking into a hornet’s nest.”

“Good thing you’ve got an early detection system.” Yeah, I did feel safer knowing he could sense sudden changes in emotion. He reached across my lap and stuck his hand between my knees.

“Hey!” I said, but it came out a little too hopeful to be a proper protest.

“You wish. Move.” His hand dove beneath my seat and surfaced with the sawed-off vintage Lupara.

“I distinctly remember telling you not to bring that thing,” I complained.

“Felt like you were daring me.” The thin lines around the outer corners of his squinty eyes tightened as his mouth quivered.

“Better than your full-sized shotgun, I suppose. At least you can hide this one.”

“You’re welcome. Come on.”

We trekked down a sidewalk webbed with cracks, my jeans brushing brittle, dead grass. The bridge running parallel had seen better days. Its concrete was marred and crumbling, girders rusted. The underbelly arching over the dry creek bed was hidden in shadow. If someone was down there, we couldn’t see them . . . but they couldn’t see us, either.

Lon stopped me where the sidewalk ended and the dusty slopes of the creek bed began. After a few moments, he glanced around and removed the Lupara from the inside of his jacket. He held up two fingers and nodded toward the shadow under the bridge. Okay, two against two. Hopefully it wasn’t two gigantic lunkheads with Merrimoth’s amped-up temperature knack. But as we took quiet, careful steps down the steep grade, following a well-worn path through dry grass, we didn’t see muscle-bound fire-breathers, or monsterific trolls waiting to collect a toll. Just three tattered camping tents lining the creek bed, a few lawn chairs, and two boys, shooting the shit and laughing.

One was dark-headed, but his back was facing us. The other was maybe sixteen, seventeen. Hard to tell. I could only see his profile. But he was husky and animated and begging the dark-haired one for something.

“Come on, let me just see it.”

The thought crossed my mind that we were about to break up some seedy yet kinda hot street punk blowjob exchange. In that case, maybe we should, you know, just wait until it was over. No sense in ruining a good show. Lon looked askance at me. I shrugged. Guess I was the only filthy-minded person, because the boy wasn’t trying to get in the other guy’s pants, he was tugging on a bag.