Running Hot

ONE

Waikiki . . .

The big man in the short-sleeved, orange and purple flowered shirt was going to be a problem in about five minutes. It didn't take a psychic to sense the angry, volatile energy stirring the atmosphere around table five. Any experienced bartender would have picked up on it. For a bartender who just happened to be psychic and who was also an ex-cop, the invisible warning signs had started blazing neon-bright when Mr. Orange and Purple Flowers walked into the Dark Rainbow half an hour earlier.

Luther Malone gave the mai tai a quick stir with a swizzle stick and set it on Julie's tray next to the beer and the Blue Hawaii. Julie leaned over the bar to pluck a cherry and a slice of pineapple out of the chilled containers.

"Got trouble on five," she said quietly. "The idiot is picking on Crazy Ray. Fortunately for the big fool, Ray hasn't noticed yet."

"I'll take care of it," Luther said.

Although the hole-in-the-wall establishment was located in Waikiki, they didn't get much tourist trade. Tucked away in a small courtyard half a block off busy Kuhio Avenue, the Rainbow catered to an eccentric group of regulars. Some of the customers, Crazy Ray among them, were more eccentric than others. Ray had long ago dedicated himself to the gods of surfing. When Ray was not surfing, he went into a Zen-like state. Everyone who knew him acknowledged that he was best left in that otherworldly zone.

"Be careful," Julie said. She garnished the mai tai with the pineapple and the cherry. "A lot of that bulk is muscle, not fat."

"Yeah, I can see that. I appreciate the tip."

Julie flashed him a quick smile. "I'd really hate to have anything happen to you, boss. The hours on this job mesh perfectly with my work at the hotel."

Like so many others employed in the tourist trade throughout Hawaii, Julie held down two jobs. Life in the islands had its benefits but it was expensive. Friday and Saturday nights she showed up at the Dark Rainbow to help with the dinner rush. Her regular day job was working the front desk at one of the countless small, faded, budget hotels that somehow managed to survive in the shadows of the big beachfront resorts and high-rise condos.

In addition to Julie two nights a week, the Rainbow usually employed a dishwasher. That position, however, was currently open. Again. Dishwashers came and went with such relentless frequency that the proprietors, Petra and Wayne Groves, no longer bothered to remember names. They called each one Bud and let it go at that. The most recent Bud had quit the previous night. Evidently the job had interfered with his regular appointments with his meth dealer.

The door to the kitchen swung open. Wayne Groves, half owner of the Rainbow, emerged with a tray of platters, each laden with mounds of deep-fried food. Pretty much everything that came out of the Dark Rainbow's kitchen was fried.

Wayne came to an abrupt halt, his attention riveted on the man in the orange and purple shirt.

Wayne had a lean, rangy build and hard, sharp features that would have suited an old-school gunslinger. His eyes went with the image. They were ice cold. He was sixty-five but could still read the last line on the chart at the eye doctor's. The truth was he could have read a few more lines below that but they didn't design eye tests for people with preternatural vision.

Wayne was covered from head to foot in tattoos, the most distinctive one being the red-eyed snake coiled around his gleaming bald scalp. The head of the snake was positioned high on his forehead, a dark jewel in an ominous crown.

Wayne was a very focused person. Most of the time the full force of his concentration was directed at taking orders for fish and chips and hamburgers or polishing glassware. But at the moment he was locked on another target. Flower Shirt didn't know it but he was now squarely in the sights of a man who had once made his living working as a sniper for a clandestine government agency.

Luther grabbed the cane that was hooked over the counter. Time to get moving. The last thing they needed at the Rainbow was an incident that would result in a visit from the Honolulu PD. The neighboring business establishments would not appreciate it. Around here, everyone liked to keep a low profile. That went double for the Rainbow's regulars, most of whom were badly damaged sensitives like Crazy Ray.

He maneuvered his way out from behind the bar. He paused briefly near the still and silent Wayne.

"It's okay," he said. "I'll handle it."

Wayne blinked and snapped out of his lethal stillness.

"Whatever," he growled. He turned and glided toward a nearby table.

The kitchen door opened again on a wave of grease-scented heat. Petra Groves, the chef and co-owner of the restaurant, appeared. She raked the room with an assessing expression while she wiped her hands on her badly stained apron.

"Had a feelin'," she said. She hadn't lived in Texas since childhood but the laid-back accent still clung to every word she spoke.

Petra's intuition, like Wayne's ability to take down a target with an impossibly long-range rifle shot, was well above normal. Actually, it could only be described as paranormal.

Both Wayne and Petra were mid-range sensitives; both had retired from the same no-name agency. Petra had been Wayne's spotter in the days when Wayne had worked as a sniper. Together they had formed a lethal team. They had also become another kind of team-partners for life.

Petra was a sturdily built woman in her early sixties. She wore her long gray hair in a braid down her back. A badly yellowed chef's toque sat squarely atop her head. A gold ring glinted in one ear. While Wayne carried a concealed gun in an ankle holster, Petra favored a knife; a big one. She kept it in a sheath beneath her long apron.

"I've got it handled," Luther said.

"Right." Petra nodded once and stalked back into the hot kitchen.

Luther tapped his way across the tiled floor. The overall level of tension in the room was rising fast. The crowd was getting restless. The study of parapsychology had been thoroughly discredited by the modern scientific establishment. Because of that, a lot of folks went through their entire lives ignoring, suppressing or remaining willfully oblivious to the psychic side of their natures. But in situations like this, even those with normal sensitivity found themselves looking around for the nearest exit well before they had registered exactly what was wrong. The crowd at the Rainbow was anything but normal.

Flower Shirt didn't seem to be aware of Luther or the restless energy of the regulars. He was too busy poking at Crazy Ray with a sharp, verbal stick.

"Hey, Surfer Bum," he said loudly. "You make a good living screwing female tourists? How much do you charge the ladies for a peek at your little surfboard?"

Ray ignored him. He continued to sit hunched over his beer, munching steadily on his deep-fried fish and fries. He had the broad-shouldered build and the burned-in tan of a man who spends his days riding the waves. His lanky brown hair had been bleached by the sun. Couldn't blame Flower Shirt for picking the wrong target, Luther thought. Ray didn't look crazy, not unless you could see his aura.

"What's the matter?" Flower Shirt said. "Got a problem answering a simple question? Where's that aloha spirit I'm always hearing so much about?"

Ray put down his beer and started to turn. Luther jacked up his senses until he could see the auras of those around him. Light and dark reversed but not in the way they did in a photographic negative. When he was running hot like this the colors he viewed were anything but black and white. The hues came from various points along the paranormal spectrum. There were no words to describe them. Energy pulsed and flared and spiked around every person in the vicinity.

The growing tension had been palpable to his normal senses, but perceived through his parasenses, it had already escalated into a flood tide of dangerously swirling currents.

The brief moment of vertigo that always accompanied the shift in perception evaporated between one step and the next. He was accustomed to the short flash of acute disorientation. He had been living with his talent since he had come into it in his early teens.

He concentrated on Ray first. Flower Shirt was the most obnoxious person within range, but Ray was the most unpredictable. The seething, barely controlled craziness showed clearly in the murky hues and erratic pulses of his aura. The most alarming stuff took the shape of sickly, greenish-yellow filaments that flashed and disappeared in no discernible pattern. The tendrils gathered strength rapidly as Ray's frail grasp on reality started to weaken. He slid rapidly into his uniquely paranoid universe.

"Keep away from me," Ray said softly.

A smart man, hearing that voice, would have backed off immediately, but Flower Shirt grinned, unaware that he was about to let a very unstable, unpredictable genie out of its bottle.

"Don't worry, Surfer Bum," he said. "The last thing I want to do is get too close to you. Might catch whatever diseases you picked up from those tourists you service."

Ray started to rise, muscled shoulders bunching beneath his ripped T-shirt. Luther was less than two feet away now. He concentrated on the unwholesome greenish-yellow spikes of energy that snapped and cracked in Ray's aura. With exquisite precision-mistakes often had extremely unpleasant consequences-he generated a wave of suppressing energy from his own aura. The pulses resonated with Ray's in a counterpoint pattern. The green-yellow tendrils of energy weakened visibly.

Ray blinked a few times and frowned in confusion. Luther tweaked his aura a little more. With a sigh, Ray lost interest in Aloha Shirt. Suddenly exhausted, he sank back down into his chair.

"Why don't you finish your beer?" Luther said to him. "I'll take care of this."

"Yeah, sure." Ray looked at the bottle on the table. "My beer."

Grateful for direction in the midst of the overwhelming ennui, he picked up the bottle and took a long swallow.

Deprived of his prey, Flower Shirt reacted with spiraling rage. His face scrunched up into a snarl. He leaned to one side and peered around Luther.

"Hey, I'm talking to you, Surfer Asshole," he yelled at Ray.

"No," Luther said, using the same low voice he had employed with Ray. "You're talking to me. We're discussing the fact that you would like to leave now."

Flower Shirt's aura was a lot more stable than Ray's. That was the good news. The bad news was that the colors were those of frustration and fury.

The politically correct view of bullies was that they suffered from low self-esteem and tried to compensate by making other people their victims. As far as Luther was concerned, that was pure bull. Guys like Flower Shirt felt superior to others and lacked all traces of empathy. Bullies bullied not out of some unconscious desire to try to compensate for their low self-esteem. They did it because they could and because they enjoyed it.

The only way to stop a bully was to scare him. The species had a strong sense of self-preservation.

There was nothing tricky or mysterious about the wavelengths of energy in Flower Shirt's pattern. The hot rush of the man's unchecked lust for verbal abuse spiked and pulsed very clearly. Luther generated the suppressing patterns. The compelling urge to hurt and dominate Ray died instantly beneath the heavy, crushing weight of exhaustion, but Flower Shirt was already on his feet, turning his attention to Luther.

"Get out of my way, bartender, unless you want a fist in your face."

He grabbed Luther's arm, intending to shove him aside. That was a mistake. Physical contact intensified the force of the energy that Luther was using.

Flower Shirt swayed a little and nearly lost his balance. He grabbed the edge of the table to keep himself upright.

"What?" he got out. "I think I'm sick or something."

"Don't worry about the bill," Luther said. He took hold of Flower Shirt's arm and steered him toward the door. "The drinks are on the house."

"Huh?" Flower Shirt shook his head, unable to focus. "Wh-what's goin' on?"

"You're leaving now."

"Oh." Flower Shirt's brow creased. "Okay. I guess. Kinda tired all of a sudden."

He made no attempt to resist. A hush fell over the crowd. The other diners watched in silence as Luther guided Flower Shirt outside into the night.

When the door closed behind them the noise level inside the Dark Rainbow went back to normal.

"What's going on?" Flower Shirt rubbed his eyes. "Where are we going?"

"You're going back to your hotel."

"Yeah?" There was no defiance in the word, just dazed confusion.

Luther guided Flower Shirt through the small courtyard, steering him around the sickly looking potted palms that Wayne had set out in a misbegotten effort to add a little authentic island atmosphere.

It was going on ten o'clock. The proprietor of the gun club on the second floor had taken in the sign that promised tourists a Safe Shooting Environment, Real Guns, Factory Ammo and Excellent Customer Service. For reasons Luther had never fully comprehended, businesses that allowed visitors to the island the opportunity to shoot in indoor ranges thrived in Waikiki.

The Red Skull Tattoo and Body Piercing Parlor and Zen Comics were also closed for the night but the rusty window air conditioners of the adult video arcade were grinding away as usual. It was the only way to know if the place was open. No light ever showed through the grimy, blacked-out windows of the arcade. The customers slipped in and out like so many wraiths, preferring the cover of darkness.

Luther prodded his zombie-like companion beneath the antique wooden surfboard that marked the entrance to the courtyard and walked him along the narrow lane to Kuhio Avenue. At this hour there was plenty of traffic, and the open-air restaurants and taverns were crowded.

He debated taking Flower Shirt another block to Kalakaua, where the brilliantly lit windows of the high-end designer boutiques and the more upscale restaurants lured herds of visitors out into the balmy night. No need to go to the trouble, he decided. He could do what needed to be done right here.

Unfortunately, it would do little good to merely dump Flower Shirt on the street. The effects of the suppression energy were short-lived. Luther knew that once he released Flower Shirt from the extreme ennui, the guy would bounce right back to whatever state was normal for him.