by Lan Chan
It would probably give me nightmares when I saw it at night, but I put it up on the notice board in my room anyway.
15
Moore was half an hour late to pick me up for our patrol before Officer Waters finally lost patience. “I’m going to ask administration to call him.”
“He’s probably just still asleep,” I noted. Monday shifts were his worst in terms of punctuality. “If you give me a pass I can just go and get him.”
She let the suggestion percolate for a minute, but I knew she’d agree when she looked at her watch and sighed. “You’re a hundred percent confident in your driving?”
“More confident than in his.”
She couldn’t argue with me there. Besides his tarnished duty record, he’d also racked up an extensive list of driving infringements. The man was a menace to society. From her desk, she produced a stack of citation papers and wrote me out a note explaining why I was an unaccompanied cadet. In the parking office, I showed the note to the elderly attendant and he gave me the keys to a spare cruiser.
“You be careful now.” His hand shook as he passed me the keys.
I opted to take the freeway towards the industrial sector instead of driving through the suburbs. Most of the traffic was trucks and tradesmen going to their next jobs. Half an hour later, I pulled up outside of Moore’s unkempt post-Reset-style home.
It was a single-storey, rendered house with grass as high as my knees. His cruiser was in the carport, and when I peered through the front window of the house, it didn’t seem as though any lights were on. This was the fool who was going to decide my future in the Academy.
There was no sign of a doorbell or a knocker so I thumped on the metal security door. I waited about a minute before knocking on the front window instead but there were still no signs of life. A quick scan of the street showed nothing out of the ordinary. There were no indications of foul play and the lock on the door hadn’t been tampered with. A white van in the driveway of the house next door told me there was someone home in there but they didn’t come out to see why there was a crazy girl banging repeatedly on their neighbour’s door.
Rather than risk going through the grass, I backtracked down the driveway and around to the gate on the other side of the house. Homes of that era often had a second method of access for maintenance purposes that usually led directly to the backyard. If anyone drove past right at this moment, they’d have seen me scaling the rotted fence palings.
I wasn’t surprised that I landed in a pile of leaf litter. Like the grass, it was almost up around my knees. The rest of the narrow pathway wasn’t any better. Covering my mouth and nose with my hand, I made myself as small as possible as I inched past where the overflowing garbage bins were pushed against the side of the house.
He seemed like the type that would have an illegal breed of dog, but when I cleared the backyard and didn’t get my leg bitten off, I breathed a sigh of relief.
Thankfully, the backyard itself was in better condition than the front. Here at least the grass had been mowed. Just for the hell of it, I tried to turn the handle of the back door. It was locked. I knocked again but there was no response.
The annoyance I’d felt until now began to morph into another beast. Not exactly concern, because I had no love for him, but this seemed to be beyond his normal realm of negligent behaviour. From the back step, I could see through a sliver in the curtain of the window. It looked into a laundry room. Around the other side was a bedroom window. The curtains were drawn but there was a tiny crack that let me distinguish the hairy outline of the figure.
He didn’t move when I tapped on the window. His bed was located horizontally to the window and I couldn’t tell whether he was breathing. For a second, I considered breaking in, but that probably wouldn’t be looked upon kindly. Against my better judgement, I allowed a very narrow channel to open up in my mind and directed it towards the figure.
Having used his telepathy indiscriminately during our patrols, I was familiar with his thought patterns. What fed back to me wasn’t anything like what I was used to. It was a dulled echo of his mind that repeated itself over and over. There was an overwhelming need to return home. He was on some kind of drug. Dammit, Moore. I didn’t want to believe that he’d be stupid enough to try Second Sight, but his thoughts carried the same resonance as the woman in Scarlet’s apartment. I headed back towards the gate, climbed over it, and went back to the cruiser.
Starting the engine, I put a call through to dispatch. They directed me back to the desk sergeant on call. I apprised him of my situation. He had a thin, sharp voice and I imagined an equally thin, hawklike person to go with it.
“I suppose he’s probably not just sleeping,” he said when I gave him Moore’s officer ID number. There was a note of sympathy in his voice. At least people felt sorry for me. “I’m going to put you on hold while we try calling him.”
The phone clicked on hold and I sat anxiously listening to the hold music. His voice came back a minute later. “No luck. We’re sending out the closest patrol pair.”
“Do I have permission to enter the premises?”
He paused. “Do you have reason to fear for his safety?”
“He’s never been this remiss before and I can’t tell if he’s breathing in there. I’ve knocked pretty loudly.”
“Go ahead. Try not to break anything too badly. He’ll probably sue.”
“Understood.”
My second call reached Oz’s voicemail. “Hey, it’s Willow. I’m outside Moore’s house. He didn’t show up to get me for our patrol, so I came here, and he’s out like a corpse. I can’t get through to him physically or mentally. I think he’s overdosed and I’m relatively sure it’s Second Sight. Dispatch has radioed in the patrol officers. I don’t have the authority to tell them not to tamper with him. Get here now!” I left him the address and hung up.
TK espers were usually best at picking locks. Zeke could do the basic ones in fewer than five seconds flat. Sadly, I didn’t have a drop of TK in me. Instead, I had to manually force the metallic locking mechanism to slide across and unclip. Luckily this one wasn’t complex. The security door simply required me to flip the switch on the other side. Sometimes I had to give up altogether because I couldn’t move all the pieces into the right places. Lily was trying to get me to memorise the engineering of a variety of locks. She refused to understand that I didn’t have an eidetic memory.
The second I swung open the back door, a sour, thickly sweet odour assaulted me. Choking, I felt it slide down the back of my throat. My footsteps echoed on the floorboards. For a moment, apprehension rendered me immobile. I was about to walk into unknown territory with no backup and no weapons. Maybe I should wait in the car for the other officers to arrive. But if I did that, it meant that I wouldn’t have an opportunity to snoop around before they got here.
Even with shoes on, I managed to step softly until I reached the bedroom door. I let my mind cast over the rest of the house. If there was someone else here I’d pick up their presence. Unless they were a Void. There was no one else here. The smell coming from the bedroom was no less unpleasant.
“Hey, Moore,” I called. “Time to get up!”
Silence. I figured it couldn’t hurt to flick the light switch on. Whatever he was doing last night, Moore hadn’t felt the need to dress up for it. His legs were sprawled out on the bed in an obscene position. The buttons of his white shirt were undone, revealing a grey singlet with singe marks on it. Here and there were ragged holes that looked like they’d been made by cigarette ash. Up close, his chest rose and fell in a barely visible rhythm.
A quick scan of the bed and the surrounding carpet didn’t reveal any drug paraphernalia. With reluctance, I allowed another layer of my shield to drop. This close, I still couldn’t detect anything from him but the light residue of telepathy. It literally felt like he wasn’t an esper at all.
Picking up a pen from the bedside table, I poked him with it. He didn’t stir. I rolled the sl
eeve of my shirt over my hand and used it to pull his eyelid up. The whites of his eyes were a pale yellow. My prodding made him snort suddenly. Startled, my thumb pulled loose and grazed his sweaty brow. The whispers began in earnest, but this time I understood their intent. The same tunnelled intention transmitted to me through Moore. The voices wanted to go home. They built up to a point where it felt like my brain was going to burst.
Dropping to one knee, I clawed at my head with both hands. The voices gurgled like water being drawn into a drain, and then like the snap of fingers, they were gone.
I shook with the aftermath of the exchange. My limbs felt heavy, as though I’d just been through a rigorous exercise program. When I did manage to stand, there was a knock on the door.
“Academy. Anybody home?” a feminine voice called out.
“In here.” They followed the sound of my voice. I frantically swept the room with my eyes and kicked myself for not looking in the ensuite before they got here. The two officers were both females, one a tall blonde with a scar across her right cheek and the other a lithe brunette that scrunched up her nose at the smell and the mess.
“Hi there,” the blonde said when she saw me. “I hope you’re Willow and not a nosy neighbour.”
I nodded at her. “I’m Officer Burrows and this is Officer Rogers. How long’s he been like this?”
“I only got here about twenty minutes ago but I’m going to guess by the smell and the state of decomposition of this pizza crust that it could have been all night.”
“Have you tried to wake him?” Rogers took a step closer to the bed but made no move to touch Moore. I didn’t blame her. After my experience just now, I wanted to steer clear of touching him at all.
“Yep. I tried to reach him with my mind too but he’s unresponsive.”
“Hmm. That can’t be good,” Burrows said. She pulled a pair of clear rubber gloves out of her pocket and put them on.
I thought I heard Rogers muttering something about it not being a bad thing that he was out of commission, but she was already heading off into the ensuite.
“We should probably call an ambulance.”
I hesitated and then thought better of trying to keep them in the dark. “I’ve rung and alerted the Psi-Ops. I think they’ll want to have a go at him before he’s taken to hospital. Also, I don’t think there’s anything actually wrong with him besides mental exhaustion.”
“Why?” Burrows frowned. She dropped to her knees and looked under the bed. I knew she’d find nothing because I’d already thought of that. I wished I’d had time, and the iron stomach, to check the mattress.
“I think he’s taken something that has to do with an ongoing investigation of theirs.”
Burrows snapped the edge of her gloves. “So we’re just here to babysit him until they arrive?”
Rogers came out of the ensuite. “Fine by me.” She turned to me with a speculative expression. “Let me guess. Second Sight?”
“Yep.” I didn’t see any reason to lie to them just because of the Psi-Ops.
“You probably can’t say but what’s the word on that?”
“They’re not very forthcoming. So far, from what I can see, they’ve got nothing because no one wants to talk to them.”
She snorted. “I wonder why.”
We didn’t get a chance to continue the conversation because a car door slammed shut outside. The three of us went quiet, our eyes flicking to each other as though we’d done something wrong.
“Willow?” Oz’s voice drifted from the front door.
“Yeah.”
“Tough break, kid,” Rogers nodded towards Moore and then she and Burrows left. I wished they’d stayed behind. I much preferred them to Flynn and Collins. Speak of the devils, they came striding into the room with Oz and Iannou. With them was the agent who had interviewed me in Scarlet’s apartment. His sweeping head motion in my direction made me think he recognised me but I couldn’t see his eyes behind his black sunglasses.
“You get around,” he said.
“I think it’s more a case of bad coincidences,” Oz said. Flynn didn’t even bother to acknowledge me. He simply stalked into the room, crossed over to Moore’s bed, and stood over him. A second later the itch in my brain told me Flynn was reading, or trying to read Moore’s mind.
“What made you think it was Second Sight?” Iannou asked.
I stood beside Oz, wanting to talk to him alone. Now I really wished that I’d had time to sweep the room before anyone else could see.
“I tried to send him a message from outside when he wouldn’t answer the doorbell and I couldn’t feel anything but static in his mind.”
“He’s an esper?”
I nodded. “An electro like me.”
The other agents were on the move now. They too strapped on forensic gloves. Iannou checked under the bed and between the frame and mattress. He did one sweep of this side and then went around doing the other. Plastic scrunched and then he pulled a baggie from the springs. It contained half a dozen innocuous-looking white capsules. Holding it away from himself like it would detonate any second, Iannou dropped it into a yellow envelope marked ‘evidence.’
Dammit.
Sunglasses came out of the ensuite empty-handed. Flynn circled around the bed like a shark. Oz went to his side. They conferred for a moment. Feeling deflated and in the way, I left the room and saw a light on in the kitchen. I’d hoped to check out my hunch about the drug having two methods of delivery by snooping through Moore’s fridge but Collins was already there. She startled when I appeared in the doorway. I wondered if Oz had shared my theory with them. Probably.
It was a modest kitchen, the only place in the house that I’d seen which was somewhat tidy. The floor and benchtops were free of dust. There weren’t any dishes in the sink. Given the amount of take-out containers strewn about the other rooms, I imagined washing up wasn’t required in this house.
Collins was leaning in front of the fridge, door open, scanning the contents. Her dark hair was braided and pinned up today. It was a far cry from the awful blonde wig she wore last time we’d met. “I don’t know how much evidence is in there,” I said.
She smiled. Her mouth stretched into a thin line when she did. “Actually, I haven’t had a chance to eat. Was kind of hoping he’d have something in here but it’s pretty much empty.” I stood beside her now and saw what she meant. There was beer in the door, a huge slab of bacon wrapped in cling film, a carton of eggs, and a half-empty carton of milk. No cough medicine or other liquid medication.
I glanced at Collins out of the corner of my eyes. “You raid victims’ refrigerators often?”
“Only when I have to!”
Moore didn’t seem like the grocery-shopping type. But I bet he was the frozen-meal type. I opened the door to the freezer section. Bingo! A whole column of heat-and-eat freezer meals stacked up on top of each other. There was also a bottle of vodka and about five tubs of artisan ice cream. I could just imagine Moore polishing off one of these a night after he’d had his frozen dinner.
Footsteps in the hallway mobilized us. Two more men appeared through the front door holding a stretcher. It took four of them to place Moore on the stretcher and carry him to the ambulance.
For some reason, I was frowning. “Which hospital are they taking him to?”
“Psi-Ops Hospital. They have better facilities to deal with an esper patient there.”
I wanted to point out that the best psi-hospital was in Tasmania, attached to the prison. That didn’t mean that we wanted to go there. Then I shook myself because on principle I shouldn’t care whether Moore was being taken to be cared for or interrogated. Yet, I watched the ambulance back out of the driveway with a bitter aftertaste in my mouth.
“What now?” I asked Oz.
“Nothing for you,” Flynn said. “This isn’t your investigation.” He stalked off to talk to his partners.
It might not be my investigation, I transmitted in Oz’s mind, but I felt the pop
again this time.
Outwardly he didn’t react, but I felt tension run through his body. I could almost feel the suggestion to share the information with the agents forming in his thoughts. After what happened last time, though, he didn’t dare.
“Go home,” he said. “We’ll talk about it later.”
I left as he suggested, but I didn’t go home. It was a testament to his distraction that he forgot I was still on duty. The issue was, now that Moore was out of commission, there was no one to supervise me.
16
Hopping back into the cruiser, I drove towards City Square. If I got caught, I’d be in deep shit, but at this point, I didn’t really care. The echo of the pop in my head was repeating itself over and over again and I couldn’t fight the notion that it had some meaning. What I needed now was answers and there was one place I thought I might get them.
Pulling up beside a payphone, I dialled Gabe’s number. It rang out. Huffing, I tried the receptionist at the hotel instead.
“Hi, this is Willow Nguyen. Is Gabriel there?”
They’d obviously been made wise to my attempts to contact Gabe. The woman on the line didn’t seem disturbed in the slightest. “He’s not here at the moment.” I wanted to scream in frustration.
“Then where is he?”
“You know I can’t give you that information.”
I gritted my teeth and tried not to snap. I was getting really sick of the old protecting me by not telling me anything scheme. Like I was helpless or stupid. “Can I leave a message for him then? And I mean a message that will actually get to him and not one that someone accidentally forgets to give him.”
The receiver clicked to signal that someone else had picked up a phone. This was now a conference call. That didn’t last for long. “Willow,” Blake breathed into the phone. The receptionist hung up as soon as she heard his voice. “I don’t appreciate you calling to terrorise my staff.”
