spent sweltering in all this heat, sweating my balls off, watching, waiting, and trying not to look suspicious. Shitty work, in weather like this. But up there at the Pleasure Dome .. /
... Up at the Pleasure Dome, he thought, putting the car in first and turning out of the parking lot, life is sheer luxury! The pools, the broads in their bikinis, the good food and drink - even the casino, huh! - where I can spend my money almost as fast, or faster, than Mr fucking Milan pays me! And he grinned.
But on the other hand, no one could call Milan mean. Garth Santeson, a private investigator for twenty years and then some, had never had it so good. What? Milan, mean? No way! Shady, definitely - how else would you describe a guy who only ever comes out at night? But never mean - hell, no! The way Aristotle Milan throws money around, it's like ... like tomorrow there'll be no use for it!Never knowing just how close he had come to the truth, and in more respects than one, Santeson headed his battered vehicle for the ring road south around Brisbane. Then he would look for the signpost for the town of Beaudesert, which would put him on a heading for the Macpherson Range right on the border with New South Wales. Eighty miles of good road, and he'd be up into the mountains, yes. And finally Xanadu ...On the way into town, Jake said, 'Now I remember!''What you were dreaming about?' said Lardis Lidesci.'Eh?' Jake looked at him.'On the plane, you were dreaming about something. When Liz woke you up you couldn't remember.'Jake shook his head. 'No, not that,' he said. 'I'm talking about Brisbane - I'm remembering about this place. Looking down on the city from the chopper, I thought it looked too neat, too new. Well, that's because it is new.'
Jake and Lardis were travelling in the first limo with the team's top technicians, a pair of young, whizz-kid computer and communications types who were fully-fledged members of E-Branch but not espers as such. One of these, Jimmy Harvey - a compact, prematurely bald man of perhaps twenty-six, with lush red sideburns and bushy eyebrows that together were trying hard to make up for his baldness, grey, watery eyes, and a genius for electronics - wanted to know: 'Jake, where have you been hiding out these last three or four years? I mean, on the Richter Scale of national disasters, Brisbane's Great Fire of 2007 ranks several notches higher than the sinking of the Titanic, and very nearly as high as Krakatoa!' There was little or nothing of sarcasm in Harvey's comment, just surprise.Jake sighed, shrugged apologetically, and said, 'Yes, that was what I remembered. As for where I've been: mainly I've been doing my own thing. My world has been - I don't know - kind of a small place, for a long time. I've only had room for personal problems, things that I need to get sorted out.''Aye,' Lardis grunted. 'Your vow! I can understand that.''My vow?' Jake frowned at him. As usual, he found the old boy full of indecipherable statements. But now:'In Sunside,' Lardis deciphered, 'when a man has something to do - a wrong that needs righting - he makes a vow, usually in public. And he holds to it until it's done. I made just such a vow one time, and it still isn't done. But if I can't be killing the blood-sucking bastards there, at least I'm helping to kill them here.'Jimmy Harvey, despite that he wasn't privy to Jake's past, believed he'd got the drift of it. 'So how about you, Jake?' he said. 'You mentioned things you "need" to get sorted out: present tense. So like Lardis, you're not finished yet, right?''Not quite, no,' Jake shook his head. 'But there's plenty of time yet.' And to change the subject: 'Why don't you tell me about Brisbane, fill in whatever it is I've missed?'The other wasn't about to start prying; the one thing he'd learned in his time with the Branch was that these people hated to talk about their private lives almost as much as about their weird 'talents'. And as far as their powers were concerned: the majority didn't see them as bonuses at all, just extra baggage. Jake hadn't been