Day Shift
Page 57

Olivia decided there was more to the woman than she’d imagined. The wind went out of Lattimore’s sails, and he deflated completely after threatening to have Magic Portal find him a room somewhere else, to which Mrs. Whitefield responded, “Good luck with that.”
The hall cleared abruptly.
Lattimore stomped into his room and shut the door, making sure to shoot the dead bolt so that everyone could hear it. Barry guided Shorty downstairs to his own room, with Olivia following at a discreet distance. Finally, Barry emerged from Shorty’s room. He looked frazzled. He did not seem surprised that Olivia was waiting for him. She said, “I came to talk to you.”
“I figured. To what do I owe the honor?”
“I have a business proposition for you.”
“Does it involve vampires in any way?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Then I’m all ears.”
Shorty’s room was at the rear of the hall. On their way to the lobby area, Olivia saw Tommy, Mamie, and Suzie playing cards in Tommy’s room with the door virtuously open. “I’ll talk to you all later,” she called. They nodded, barely lifting their heads from their cards.
Barry brought her a can of Coke. Olivia popped the top to be sociable, though carbonated beverages were not her drink of choice.
“You seem to understand old people,” she began, wanting to start on a positive note.
“I understood that I needed to come find out what was happening when I got to Shorty’s apartment in Nevada and found out he’d gone,” Barry said grimly. “As you saw just now, my grandfather has memory glitches. He seems to have managed to cover that up from the people who lured him here. Evidently, he told them that he had no living relatives. The Whitefields were some kind of surprised when I tracked him down.”
“I didn’t know any of that,” Olivia said, after an appreciable pause.
“I know,” he said.
“The other three were brought here the same way, but at least they all knew each other,” Olivia said. “No wonder your grandfather is so disoriented.” He was in a strange land with strange people.
“In all fairness, this is a lot nicer than the apartment he was in,” Barry said. “And someone’s watching him all the time, though maybe not closely enough, as I discovered today. But since no one at all was minding him before, this is still better. But I need to know why he was brought here, who brought him, what they want.”
This was an issue Olivia had planned to investigate after she’d solved Manfred’s problems, so she wasn’t best pleased at having it pushed to the forefront of the agenda. But she accepted it as inevitable. “You can’t take care of him, I gather?”
“I don’t see how,” Barry said. “I haven’t settled anywhere in years, and I can’t stay in Texas.”
“You have some history here in this state?”
“Most of it bad,” he said gloomily.
“I take it you have vampire trouble.”
He nodded. “You could say that. I would rather have done anything than follow Shorty’s trail to Texas, but all my roads seem to lead back here. I had a hell of a lot of bad luck in Dallas, mostly due to my own stupidity. The vampire population here has . . . Well, they’re prejudiced against me, let me just say.”
“There’s only one in this area. And he’s unusual. And he’s not here at the moment.”
“That gives me exactly one drop of relief, into a bucket of worry.”
“Plus, in the summer, a lot of the vamps have started migrating.”
“Sure. Somewhere where the days aren’t so long.” Barry sounded very familiar with vampire habits.
“You’re not a hunter, are you?”
He snorted. “Do I look like a fool with a death wish?”
She shook her head. “No, but people don’t always look like what they are. No one would look at you and say, ‘He’s a telepath.’”
“We’re definitely not common,” he said offhandedly.
“There are many more?” She didn’t disguise her surprise.
“At least one more.” He obviously wasn’t going to talk about that. “What do you need?” He’d been relaxed, chatty, but no longer.
“All right,” she said, with equal briskness. “I need you to go with Tommy, Suzie, and Mamie tomorrow on a little road trip to a fancy house in a suburb of Dallas. Manfred and I will go with you most of the way, but we’re not going to the house in question. We’ll fill you in on everything at length, so you’re prepared. But what we need you to do, if you agree, is get in the house, get the older people up to the room designated as the library, and look at it as hard as you can while you’re there. There’s something hidden there, and we need to know where to start to look. Now that I know what you can do, I also want you to get as close to the man named Lewis as you can. Get everything you can out of his mind. And tell us what you see.”
“How much?” was all Barry asked.
Naturally, Olivia was curious about Barry’s need for money. He was able-bodied, personable, not stupid. But actually, it didn’t matter.
“No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”
Having a telepath around was a two-edged sword. “Interesting,” Olivia said, after an appreciable pause. “I’m so used to assuming my mind is opaque that I simply hadn’t applied your particular skill to me.”