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than crossing open spaces. The door slammed out, and he heard a woman’s voice raised over a man’s strangled cry.
    Well, well,
he thought.
And they say there’s no such thing as coincidence…and where the Power’s involved, there ain’t no such thing. Could that be who I think it is? Sending my ol’ buddies after me? Tricky, but tricks can work both ways, Adrian.
    It was definitely the pair from the wrecked vehicle; you were about as likely to see a bullfrog playing a mandolin as a local woman in a village tavern hereabouts.
    Three men came though the door; one sagged, and his friends were holding him under the arms as he gasped and whimpered and made cradling motions around his crotch, as if he wanted to rub himself but was afraid to. A moment later he began to puke, at which point his friends cursed and shifted their grip to his back.
    Harvey ducked aside and ghosted down a rubbish-strewn alleyway behind the inn that stank of stale urine even in the cold, then eeled through a back door. Down a narrow hallway between walls that had thelumpy smoothness of plastered adobe, past a kitchen where an antique gas range threw heat and the cook’s back was to him as he began to pack up for the night. He took out the weapon, waited until there was a metallic clatter and racked the hammers back; there was nothing quite like that little springy
click
to alert the experienced ear.
    Then he halted a foot back from a screen of wooden bead strings that gave onto the largish front chamber, the gun held down by his thigh, as inconspicuous as possible with a massive deadly weapon. People saw what they expected, even when you didn’t encourage them with the Power.
    The air was hazy with harsh tobacco smoke; rural Turkey hadn’t caught on to the no-smoking thing yet. There was also the scent of garlic-heavy grilled meat, and the distinctive bitter-spirits and aniseed smell of raki, double-distilled white lightning made from grape pomace or (in a place like this) sugar-beet molasses. Most of the patrons seemed to be gone, though it was early in a winter’s evening, the slow season of the farming year. Possibly the village was unusually religious, but he wouldn’t bet on it. Those few left were bristly-chinned middle-aged men built like swarthy barrels on legs, and they were clumped at the tables over by the door, trying
not
to look at the pair closer to the back wall here.
    Those two weren’t making any attempt to blend in, just sitting and radiating pissed-off contempt for their surroundings, along with vibrations of extreme danger. Which was Anjali Guha and Jack Farmer to the life, both among his favorite blunt instruments. They were in denim jeans and laced hiking boots and expensive if slightly battered oiled-cotton jackets, the type with lots of pockets and brass snaps and leather patches on their elbows.
    She had an oval face with skin the color of milk chocolate and eyes so black the pupils disappeared in the iris, and was fine-boned withoutlooking the least fragile. Her hair was clubbed at the back of her neck, with a few strands escaping as if she’d done something energetic lately, and it was that raven’s-wing black that has bluish highlights. The locals flinched when she looked up from her glass at them.
    Her companion had
American
—and specifically
Upper Midwest
—written all over him, blond crew cut, pale-blue eyes, face like a pug-nosed clenched fist and the build of someone who’d be stocky if he hadn’t also exercised fanatically. Both of them could have been anywhere between tired mid-twenties and fit early middle age; the man had a frosting of light stubble on his face.
    The woman spoke, her voice flavored with the slight mellifluous sing-song of a native Hindi speaker who’d grown up with an old-fashioned dialect of British English as her second language, before spending many years in the United States:
    “I am thinking: Why do I spend so much of my life dealing with troglodyte sexist
banchuts
in places