Jezebel's Ladder Read Online Free Page B

stay?”
    The boy shrugged. “Anybody who can
face the Zombie Master is good for the long haul.”
    She tried for a smile, but her face
was overloaded. “Great. When do I meet the rest of the team?”
    Daniel looked both ways. “Aside
from the drivers that they rotate every few days and the two bodyguards, I’m
it.”
    When they arrived at the
apartments, he excused himself. “Normally, I’m all over the mall, but I’ve been
awake since noon yesterday. I need my rest.”
    ****
    Jez bought more than she should
have: clothes, laptop, electronic book reader, and shoes. She could have filled
a bag with shoes alone. The freedom was electrifying. When the car wouldn’t
hold any more bags, she tried to go out for a big dinner. However, with no one
to join her and no alcohol, she settled for a chicken Caesar salad to go. Then
she went back to the apartment to unwrap her acquisitions and play. At 7:30
p.m., while trying on a new, silk blouse, she saw Daniel’s ghostly form phase
through the bathroom wall.
    “Get out, pervert!” she shouted,
bombarding him with invective. “You’d better pray you get back to your body
before I do.”
    Even disembodied, Daniel raised his
hands defensively. “Sorry. Dirt Bag ordered me to. He wanted to know if you
could still see me. It won’t happen ever again, I swear!”
    She was getting paid to be a den
mother to a professional peeping Tom. Putting on a cotton business shirt,
slacks, and running shoes, she felt ready for anything.
    She knocked on his door fifteen
minutes early. The guard let her into the apartment, and then waited in the
hallway.
    Daniel was already in pajamas,
ready to work. “We have a busy night tonight,” he said, avoiding discussion of
his earlier indiscretion. “When I’m out, lower the headboard microphone to my
lips. Sometimes, when I find documents, I read them out loud. Even in other
languages, we can make sense of it with the right transcriber. When I come
back, give me a new pad of paper. My recall is best during the first few minutes
awake. I draw as much as I can to get details of the encounters. I flesh out
the sketches between dives.”
    Jez found that if she just repeated
a word, it kicked his instruction generator again. “Dives?”
    Daniel lectured. “Out of body
excursions. I can’t see pages directly, so I’m scouting people who showed up as
anomalies on somebody else’s radar. I look for high gamma-wave output, odd
behavior, new technology, and reader flares. If that pans out, we send in the
negotiators like Buddy.”
    “If that fails?” she asked.
    “We usually bribe someone close to
the artifact to acquire it for us.”
    “Or steal it yourselves.”
    He shrugged. “This is species
survival. Dirt Bag doesn’t suffer idiots for long, especially when the other
groups are keeping watch on his every move. You got a problem with that?”
    “No, I just wanted to know what I
should be looking for while Buddy is talking.”
    Daniel smiled. “You’re a very
flexible woman.”
    “I think you mean adaptable, but
yes, that too,” she said with amusement. He actually blushed. “Do they all last
the same amount of time? Are they linked to a REM cycle or something?”
    “It’s not sleep. The length of each
dive depends on how close the subject is. My max range is roughly a hundred
miles, but that’s really deep water. I can only do a couple of those a day
before I’m useless. I have to be physically close if I don’t have a clear
target. That’s why I was in the bus for you. I can do about twelve dives per
night. Some subjects take multiple dives to make sure.”
    “How do you find a target?” she
asked.
    Daniel pointed to the stack of
folders, and she handed him the top one. Inside was a color photograph of a
man, a detailed list of his favorite haunts, background information, and a used
napkin. “I used to drive by each person for a visual. Unfortunately, that only
worked about half the time, added overhead, and I could only get