Kingmaker (2 page)

What she needed was time to read her mother's book and for the police investigation to lose its intensity. She needed to go to ground and she needed to put some serious miles between herself and all this police attention.

For that, she needed wheels. A pickup with a camper would be an ideal solution to her need for someplace to stay and for mobility.

She slipped into a shabby used car lot about a mile from the I-Hop, continually moving north, away from her parents’ home and, she hoped, the center of police attention.

A chubby redheaded guy with sweat stains on his long-sleeved shirt tossed a cigarette and hustled out to greet her. “You looking for something in particular? Interest rates are going up, but we've still got some financing at last month's rates. Easy payments."

"How much is that one?” She pointed at an aging Ford pickup.

"Well, that's pretty good transportation, but I'd like you to take a look at the Ram Truck. The extended cab will give you a lot more room for friends when you want to go on that camping trip."

She resisted the urge to glare at him. “I'm interested in the Ford. How much are you asking?"

"Okay. Excuse me for wanting to help.” He mopped sweat from his forehead. “I could give you that truck for two-ninety a month. Your good job is your credit at Big Pete's."

If the circumstances had been different, Ellie would have enjoyed this. He was a lot older than she—probably late twenties, and was obviously attracted by her. Or rather, he was responding to the outfit and the blonde highlights she'd sprayed into her hair. She figured she could manipulate him until his tongue got all tied up and he cut her one heck of a bargain. But these weren't ordinary circumstances. She didn't want to negotiate with him and especially didn't want to call more attention to herself by flirting with him. She wanted to get a truck and get away from L.A. before she got thrown into jail.

"I'm paying cash. How much is it?"

"Oh. Cash.” He said it like it was a dirty word. They probably made most of their money in interest and in repossession. “I guess I'll have to talk to the manager. See if I can get you a deal."

"All right.” She followed him into the showroom and sat where he pointed, in a tiny cubicle with a tiny desk.

"Just wait here.” He vanished down the hall.

Ellie recognized the talk-to-the-manager scam. She used the time to start reading through the hand-lettered book her mother had left. Once she got over the hard-to-read calligraphy, it was interesting, presented as if it were a journal of some famous Samurai-style warrior. She couldn't figure out what it had to do with spying, but her mother wouldn't have hidden it in the cache if it hadn't been important. The trick was figuring out what it meant, what message they'd intended to reach her alone.

It wasn't until the salesman had been gone for a while—too long—that Ellie came out of her reading trance and realized that something was wrong.

No salesman will ignore a paying customer. Yet she was being ignored. Which had to mean that he didn't think she was a legitimate customer.

Since she'd told him she had cash, that couldn't be the problem. Only one other possibility struck her. She'd been identified. And she'd been sitting there like a lump waiting for him to notify the cops.

She picked up her bundle and headed toward the back of the suspiciously quiet offices.

She opened the back door in time to see the last of the employees and customers being ushered off the lot by a group of cops. They weren't wearing SWAT uniforms, which might mean she had a few minutes before they moved in, but there was no way she was going to walk past them.

She rejected giving herself up. First, her father's warning had been to trust no one. Second, if the cops discovered the cash in her backpack, they'd almost certainly decide she had killed her own parents for money. The television spokeswoman had as good as accused her of murder already. If she surrendered, she could count on spending the rest of her life in jail. Which would mean that her parents’ real killers would walk.

She shook her head firmly. When she found the real killers, she would consider turning herself over to the police. And only then.

"We have you surrounded. Throw down your weapons and come out with your hands raised."

Ellie glanced through the windshield of the midsize panel truck she'd found the keys for. Maybe she'd seen too much cop-T.V. but it looked like they'd gotten overconfident. The cops had lined a couple of squad cars along the roads leading away from the used truck lot, but they hadn't placed real roadblocks.

She shifted into low gear, accelerated the heavy truck through the showroom's oversized door and then floored it.

Cops spun out of her way like bowling pins as she blared her horn and kept rolling.

She smacked her truck directly into the space between the two squad cars and prayed.

Her body jerked forward at the sudden deceleration, but her truck was bigger, heavier than the two cars. She kept rolling.

A faint sound of popping let her know that the cops were shooting at her. Which made twice, in two days, that someone had tried to kill her.

So far, turning eighteen had sucked.

Still, if she wanted to make it to nineteen, she needed to keep moving.

The cops only took a few seconds before they were in their cars and following, but she knew this neighborhood. She'd ridden her bike down every street and every dirt path. A couple of quick turns and she found the narrow dead-end alley she was looking for. They'd think she'd trapped herself.

She slanted the truck so it blocked the entire alley, scooted out, and ducked through the back door of the Chinese restaurant where her mother had worked before the Dojo started taking all of her time.

None of the cooks even looked up as she walked through, even when she grabbed a blue jacket from the hook, leaving a hundred dollar bill in its place.

She strolled out the restaurant's front door, crossed the street, walked through a video game store, and watched the police cars stream by.

They'd block off the entire area soon, but they hadn't done it yet.

She spent another hundred dollars at a Salvation Army thrift store and got herself a secondhand bike.

From there, a couple of dirt paths, a short bicycle trail, and a few frightening moments on Hawthorne Boulevard brought her to the Del Amo Mall.

Since her blonde hair dye hadn't fooled anybody, it was time for a more radical change. If Ellie had been more girlie, she'd have known how to do makeup and age herself. Since she wasn't, she decided to become a boy.

Some of the guys in her high school had called her a dyke because she didn't wear makeup and didn't simper the way lots of girls did. Even though she knew her father would lecture her for it, she'd kicked their butts. They might still think nasty thoughts about her but after that, they'd kept their mouths shut.

As she hacked away her hair, she was glad they couldn't see her now. They would be certain they'd been right. Tough. As far as she could tell, being a guy basically meant being a slob with no makeup and short hair. She could handle that.

Baggy jeans, a sloppy t-shirt, and a pair of Converse All-Stars, together with a buzz cut she administered in the woman's rest room did the job. Her martial arts training kept her slim. She didn't have a lot of chest to tie down so an Ace bandage around her breasts did that trick.

Nobody was likely to mistake her for an eighteen-year old girl now, but she had another problem. Nobody was going to rent a room to the thirteen year-old boy she looked like. And she could only hope they wouldn't look too closely at the walking stick she carried. Not likely since it was way out of context for a kid, even though she worked on a limp.

At least she was in the perfect spot to blend in. Del Amo is huge, and filled with weird people. She ate lunch at the food court, then settled down with her parents’ book at a Starbucks.

She was more than fifty pages into the story when she stopped abruptly. The characters, a warrior and a female mage, had just been given a baby princess and ordered to flee from the magical kingdom. What followed was a complex set of instructions in setting up some magical jewels that would allow a transition between dimensions.

It was ridiculous, of course, but the baby princess was named something that translated, phonetically, to Ellie.

She felt the bag of jewels in her pack. Could the story be real? She could buy international spies and terrorist organizations. But fantasy was, after all, fantasy. It wasn't something that happened to real people. Reality was twenty-first century America. She'd studied enough science to know that parallel universes were possible and that the current
theory of everything
relied on something like nine physical dimensions rather than the three she could see. But that didn't mean that magic would work in any dimension, or that there was any way of moving between them short of a black hole.

But how else did she have this book—and these jewels?

Every girl she knew fantasized that they didn't really belong to their parents. Somehow, though, Ellie didn't think many parents fantasized that their daughters were adopted. But either her mother had spent countless hours creating a story that no one could even read because it was in a language that no one else on Earth spoke, or reality was even stranger than spies, terrorists, and international jewel thieves.

If the book was real, she now knew where her parents’ killers had come from. They'd crossed the same dimensional barrier that she and her parents had crossed when she'd been an infant. After the murders, they'd probably returned to their home. Even if they hadn't, yet, the other dimension was the place to look for whoever had sent them, whoever's plan lay behind the killings.

Of course, it could be that she'd been such a bad daughter her mother had made up a story wishing she had come from somewhere else.

Ellie opened the jewel bag and some of her doubts faded. The stones glowed.

People talk about luminescent gems, but what they really mean is that the jewels reflect and refract light. These didn't. They were more like multicolored light emitting diodes, generating their own cool sparkle.

This was too weird.

She moved a couple around the pouch and felt the stones resist, as if they were magnetic or contained tiny gyroscopes.

It could be a gag, but her parents had never been the joking sorts. Impossible though interdimensional travel might seem, she could believe that more easily than she could believe her parents had set this entire thing up as a hoax.

Ellie hissed in a deep breath and made her decision. She would stay free until tonight, and then, when no one was around to stop her, she would lay out the jewels in the pattern her parents had used to come here. Maybe they would send her back to the other dimension—where she could track down her parents’ killers. If they didn't work, she'd come up with another plan.

She packed up her mother's book, put away the gems, and set off on a disciplined shopping trip.

She shopped the Barnes and Noble for practical books on outdoor survival and, because her mother's description of the world she came from sounded medieval, a book on technology. At the last minute, Ellie added a book on medieval warfare, weapons, and tactics.

But she spent most of her time, and money, at a camping store.

Eight hundred dollars later, she had a tent, a sleeping bag, hiking boots and thermal clothes, a fiberglass reflex bow and a dozen hunting arrows (they had taken one look at her and turned her away when she'd tried to buy a gun), a knife and one of those scout cooking kits, as well as enough freeze-dried food to keep her fed for a month.

She'd thought finding a place to hide out once they shut the mall would be the problem but she solved that by buying the smock and badge from a kid in shipping who was leaving work for the day.

Invisibly uniformed, her purchases in one of the little carts the department store used for moving clothes around, she ducked into a department store service elevator and pushed the button for the lowest floor.

She'd never been beneath a mall before. All shiny and modern above, belowground, it was a warren of concrete passageways with boxes, racks of clothes, and computers scattered everywhere. The kids from her school who lived for role-playing games would have had a blast down here.

Her borrowed smock let her blend in—she didn't look at anyone and they, intent on their jobs unpacking boxes, loading new clothes on racks, and scanning barcodes into computers, ignored her as well. She pushed her cart through the basement like she knew where she was going, and looked for a hideout.

It only took her a few minutes to find a circular rack of winter coats that had been pulled from a display when spring wardrobes had been brought out.

She glanced around to make sure no one was looking, parked her supplies in a recess where she hoped no one would look, and then burrowed into the rack. Then she waited.

At nine o'clock that evening, the basement below the mall took on a fevered urgency as workers finished whatever they couldn't do while customers had been in the store and finally headed out.

A few minutes before ten, someone switched off the lights, leaving Ellie alone in a darkness broken only by a few glowing
Exit
signs.

She waited another half-hour. Sure enough, a security guard tromped through, checking the lockers and helping himself from the bowl of jellybeans someone had left on their desk.

He finally vanished, and Ellie was in the clear.

She pushed her way out of the coat rack and headed for a large table.

The stones shed enough light for her to read when she spilled them on the table, and she propped open her mother's book to the page where she'd described, and sketched, the jewel pattern that, according to the book, had brought them to Earth.

A large blue stone formed the centerpiece. About six inches below it, an equally large green jewel formed a sort of punctuation, like the dot under an exclamation mark.