Fired Up

He needs answers the way other people need food and oxygen.”
    “Got it,” Chloe said. “He’ll want to know if the lamp actually works and what effect it has.”
    “Right. And he needs me to run the experiment.”
    “Think he knows we’re in Vegas?”
    “If he knows I hired you, then we have to assume he also knows we’re here and that we’ve got the lamp. With luck he hasn’t found us yet because we didn’t use any ID at the motel. But it won’t take him long to track us down. We need to get off the grid altogether.”
    “Hmm.”
    “What are you thinking?”
    “I’m thinking Uncle Edward,” she said.
    “Your uncle who specializes in antique furniture here in town? What good can he do us? I’m not in the market for a Louis the Sixteenth commode at the moment.”
    “Uncle Edward operates a little sideline with his son, Dex, and Dex’s wife, Beth. You could call it another traditional family business.”
    “From what I’ve heard, the Harper family businesses usually involve fakes and forgeries.”
    “Turns out one of the things Cousin Dex and Beth have a talent for is producing fake IDs,” Chloe said.
    “That is very good news. The one I commissioned last year may not be good now. I wouldn’t put it past Jones to know about it.”
    “Assuming you’re reading him right,” she said.
    “I told you I know him, or, at least, I did at one time.”
    “What went wrong with your friendship?” she asked.
    “A few years ago Fallon started showing some quirks. He was never what you’d call a real social kind of guy, but more and more he began to withdraw. He’d disappear into an Arcane lab or one of the Society’s museums for weeks at a time. When he took over J&J he pretty much vanished altogether. Went to live in a small town on the Northern California coast. Lately he’s become obsessed with some shadowy conspiracy he calls Nightshade.”
    “What in the world is Nightshade?” she asked.
    “From what I could gather, it’s an organization run by a bunch of psychic bad actors. Apparently they’ve re-created the founder’s formula. Fallon thinks J&J is the only agency that can stop them.”
    “Good grief. A group of criminal sensitives hyped up on Sylvester’s drug? Sounds like Fallon Jones has gone over the edge, all right.”
    “Don’t bet on it,” he said. “This is Fallon Jones we’re talking about. I told you, he’s almost always right when it comes to his conspiracy theories. But whether or not there is such a thing as Nightshade is not my problem. All I care about is the lamp.”
    He urged her through the glass doors of the motel lobby. The desk clerk leaned around the corner of the office door, gave them a bored once-over and went back to his centerfold.
    There was only one player sitting in front of the slots now, not a senior citizen this time, but a man in his early twenties who looked like he spent a lot of time pumping iron and injecting steroids. He was dressed in jeans, heavy boots and a leather jacket. He didn’t pay any attention when Jack urged Chloe toward the stairs. He punched the play button.
    Wheels of fruit whirled, bells clanged. The bulked-up biker had just won. Probably all of ten bucks, Jack thought. No telling how much money the guy had poured into the machine before getting the pay-off. But it would probably be enough to make him hit play again. He would feed all ten dollars back into the slot. That was how gambling worked. You only had to win occasionally to keep you coming back for more: the theory of intermittent reinforcement in action.
    On the landing, he brought Chloe to a halt and looked back down into the lobby. Instead of hitting play again, the heavily muscled man in leather and denim was collecting his winnings. He walked outside and disappeared from view. So much for the theory of intermittent reinforcement.
    Jack put his mouth close to Chloe’s ear. “Take a look at the slot that guy was using.”
    She peered down into the lobby. “What about it?” she asked, equally soft. “Looks like every other slot machine I’ve ever seen.”
    “Use your other sight.”
    “Oh, right.”
    Energy swirled delicately in the atmosphere around him as she slipped into her other senses. Like some subtle, exotic perfume, it aroused him and stirred the hair on the back of his neck in a very intimate way. A man could get used to this feeling real fast.
    “Oh, geez,” Chloe whispered.
    She shivered and stepped back quickly, coming up hard against