by Alex Hughes
“I know,” I said. “I know. But if Joey’s right, and it’s two Guild guys killing—at least seven bodies that we know about? Maybe more? That’s not an accident. That’s not an oops-I-didn’t-mean-to-kill-the-poor-citizen moment. That’s somebody with purpose, maybe two guys with purpose. I can’t be everywhere. I can’t protect everyone. And all it takes is five seconds, five seconds for someone to burn your brain from the inside.”
Her eyebrows narrowed. “Why didn’t you say this before, when we were talking about the killer in the first place?”
I took a breath. “To be honest, we’re not supposed to talk about details. The training is limited to maybe a handful of guys. There’s rules, Enforcement. Process. I’d rather not deal with any of that crap, trust me. But I can’t be everywhere at once. We need to call them. There’s things they can do we can’t touch.”
She leaned back, keeping a lid on her anger only with difficulty. “I swear, you were put on this earth to make my life difficult.” She blew out a line of air. “The Guild’s trouble. You yourself have said it a hundred times. And I’m not convinced we need them. Two guys, well, we can track the records, start eliminating suspects. Sounds like something you should do. Like something you should have done before this.”
“I can try to run down the records, cross-check.” I folded my arms. “But half of the guys with that training are off the books on purpose. Black ops.”
“Of course they are,” Paulsen said. She muttered under her breath for a good long moment, and I did not listen in.
“We need to call the Guild,” I repeated, though it burned to say. “They have resources, names, and data that we need. Maybe they’ll even share.”
She looked up, scrutinizing my face, my body language. “What aren’t you telling me?”
Um, what to say? I settled on a version of the truth. “There’s a lot I’m not telling you. I can’t tell you, kicked out or not—there are a lot of Guild secrets I only know of through rumors. I’m not getting my ass in trouble for rumors. But I can tell you this much: At least one of the killers is Guild. Not affiliate, not I-joined-because-you-made-me-and-I’ll-just-coast-along, but hard-core, invested, I-know-the-company-secrets kind of Guild. The I’m-not-listed-in-any-public-database kind of Guild. The scary kind. The kind we probably can’t touch legally. We need help here, Lieutenant.”
She seriously considered it, and a chill ran through me. Was I really asking for this? Killer or no, breaking ethics or no, these were the people who kicked me out. Who humiliated me. And who might easily come after me for telling their secrets. I was not the guy I was ten years ago. I was not the golden boy, the genius professor, the idealist anymore. I was a drug addict, a cynic—a doubter. Pathologically. I knew all the things that could go terribly wrong, and if I reported every little violation of ethics, I’d never stop. People broke the rules. That was life.
I took a breath, clamped down on all of my complex feelings about the Guild. I was probably making myself a bigger target by doing this, but I didn’t care. There was part of me that was still that idealist telepath. Part of me that thought killing with the mind was a sin worse than murder with a knife. A part of me that still lived by those ethics, those Guild ethics. I was in trouble, I thought. I was arguing for contacting the very people who made my life living hell. But I couldn’t take it back.
Lieutenant Paulsen took a deep breath. “Get out of here. I’ll talk to Branen, but I don’t see why you can’t call them for information if it’s so incredibly important to you.”
I looked in the face of what I’d asked for, scary as hell. And I didn’t run away, not quite. I kept it to a walk. A sedate and dignified walk.
CHAPTER 6
I was sitting on a small chair in the coffee closet, turned sideways to fit in the narrow space. The creaky table, coffeepots, and endemic stale donuts to my left had a comforting smell, the closet light above pleasantly dim. There were no desks for ten feet in any direction, so the minds of those around me receded to a dull whisper and I could think. Well, until Cherabino walked in my direction.
She stuck her head in the door without knocking. “Want to grab some food?”
At least I’d gotten half an hour to stew about the mess I’d somehow gotten myself into. Not long enough to come up with anything useful, but long enough to calm down.
Her gaze flicked around the tiny space. “I don’t understand why you like it here. It’s like a coffee-scented coffin. Tiny.”
“But delicious smelling,” I said. I forced myself not to rub my head, not to twitch, not to put any warning signs out for her to pick up. “My turn to buy, right?”
“Guess that means Mexican again,” Cherabino said. She didn’t really like Mexican.
There were no stars in the sky, but I could see the full moon through the haze of night pollution. The streetlights here were all either burned out or set on low to save the city money. We had another block up the hill and across the train tracks to the restaurant, a trek we’d made a hundred times. I was keeping my ears open in Mindspace, making sure I’d see trouble coming. I didn’t want a repeat of the junkie this afternoon. I was also trying not to think of the Guild, not to consider what I was doing. I would deal with it when it came.
“Any news on the case?” I asked her, in an attempt at distraction.
“Some.” She was walking slouched, her hands in her pockets, turned in on herself. “Fingerprints came in from a couple of the early scenes. There are some smears on the bodies, but otherwise no prints but the victim’s. He might be using gloves or skin sealant to hide his prints.”
“A teleporter with gloves?” Really?
“Lots of people actually watch television,” Cherabino said, tired. “Fingerprints have been around so long, the shows actually get that much right. Watch the fibers be generic cotton too. I’m telling you, this case is seriously pissing me off.”
“That’s why we should call the Guild.” At her nasty look, I said, “What? Cause of death and the Mindspace evidence—”
“Which no one can see but you.”
“I have a rating of—”
“Blah, blah, your fabulous rating. If we can’t put you in front of a jury, it doesn’t mean anything.”
“Doesn’t mean anything? I got a guy to talk today about seeing our killers. On tape. You put a monkey in front of a suspect and get the information on tape, it’s admissible. Isn’t that what you keep telling me?” I asked her, furious.
She ignored me. “Killers?”
I was overreacting. I put my hands in my pockets. Nodded. “Says there’s two.”
“And what do these two killers look like?”
At least she was asking. “Two white guys from the north side, rich, no discernible accent, one younger and one older.”
“Well, that’s only forty percent of the population.”
“It’s better than we had.”
She blew out a breath. “How reliable is the witness?”
“He’s a beta for the area surrounding the scenes. Joey the Fish? He claims the murders are bad for business, and he wants the guys to go away.”
She stumbled on an uneven sidewalk. In the back of her mind, I got a glimpse of a name connected to Joey, and a worry that the thing he was connected to—and the case—would interfere with her ceremony next week.
“Who’s Fiske?” I asked her without thinking. Crap, double crap, I was reading her again without meaning to.
Cherabino stared at me as we passed out of the area of one streetlight and entered another. Her face flashed with surprise, disbelief, irritation, and something that on anyone else I would have called vulnerable. “Keep your mind to yourself! That name—which you should forget—is Joey’s connection to Them.” She meant the Darkness. What used to be called the Mafia back when it was still a small-time Italian job. That much was obvious. I mean Joey was the beta, right?
“This guy is his boss?”
“I can’t talk about an investigation for the Feds,” she said f
irmly. “Try to forget you heard it. And stop snooping! One of these days you’re going to end up dead for having the wrong information. That and it’s rude. Really rude.”
I moved forward at the same time that Cherabino grabbed the restaurant’s door, and somehow we ended up nose to nose.
“I’ve got the door,” she said.
I didn’t move away and neither did she. Her eyes widened. I looked at her mouth. She couldn’t hide the buzz of reluctant interest, but she looked away, a rebuff.
“You go, then.” She relinquished the door.
I hesitated before moving inside the restaurant, suddenly confused. I put my name on the list.
Cherabino waved to some of the other cops already seated. This was a popular hangout for the second-shift “lunch.” The parking lot had almost as many cop cars as the department parking lot.
The waitress seated us in a booth. We’d been here more times than I could count, but suddenly it felt different.
“Good interviews today?” Cherabino asked. She studied the menu like it was the key to the universe, but this was not new. For a split second I wondered if I’d only imagined the attraction in her mind.
As the waiter arrived, I tried to smile; I’d waited tables for maybe two weeks somewhere in my slide to the streets. I’d been a shitty waiter. It was a hard job, and much harder when you were doped up to your gills. I ordered for us both.
“You know, I might have wanted something different this time,” Cherabino said.
“Did you?” I asked her. She always got a plain quesadilla, no meat, no salsa, nothing fun at all. “I can call the guy back.”
“That’s not the point.”
I knew I was stepping in it, but I had to ask. “Well, what’s the point, then?”
“The point?” She smiled wryly. “You have heard of feminism, right? Respect? Women making their own choices?”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of it. The downside is when you get predictable. Efficiency, you know?” I smiled back, unable to help myself, glad for once to see her happy.
“Efficiency is it?”
“Yes,” I said solemnly. “Much faster when hungry he-man needs to eat.”
“He-man?” She started laughing, and I let her, my tension dissipating as hers did.
The food arrived and I dug in. We talked about inconsequential things while her happiness started to bleed over into me. I basked in it—stood under it joyfully like a warm sunbeam on a chilly day.
I loved this, her happiness, her openness—I couldn’t name the last time I’d seen it. Her smile, rare as an old two-dollar bill, made something inside me smile too.
“We should go out more often,” I said without thinking.
Her eyes changed. I felt her nervousness.
“Out of the station,” I said quickly. “Food’s much better here.”
We held eye contact for a long moment, and I memorized the blue of her eyes, emphasized by that dark stuff she put on her lashes.
She looked down. Twisted her napkin in her lap. She fought interest and unease, neither feeling easy to ignore.
“Is it just me or is the workload getting heavier for DeKalb?” I asked. Work seemed to put her at ease, and I wanted that happiness back from earlier. I wanted her happiness more than anything else right now.
She glanced at me, a furtive glance from under her eyelashes. She thought my stubble was sexy. Did I really have—oh. Yeah. Hadn’t shaved since yesterday. And she thought—
As Cherabino told me crime was up and budgets down, I realized. I shouldn’t have been able to read that thought about my face. It had been a quiet, private thought.
I closed her out with a lot of effort. Had I used her for an anchor too much? Concentrated on her mind to shut out the others one too many times? After six years of working with her on and off, had I crossed some vague line and connected us? Even the lightest, most polite Link in the world meant any concept of privacy got real fuzzy real fast.
Personal space and privacy were strange things; some people didn’t care at all, some would freak out from the slightest touch, but most people would let you in freely, and then kill to protect those last few inches. Cherabino was one of the last camp, and no matter how forgiving she was on the surface stuff, I knew the whole concept of mind reading bothered her more than she admitted. It was important I didn’t ruin whatever trust she had left in me. And the part of me that was still Guild—the part of me that still believed in certain ethics as a telepath—that part was very very disturbed by this…connection of ours.
What I’d meant to be a Scotch tape connection was turning into something more—maybe duct tape, maybe stronger still. A connection that, if I was right, could break all the location-based laws of physics and let me find her anywhere, talk to her at any time. Let her do the same to me—if she could. I didn’t know what to do about it. I didn’t know at all, and that scared me.
A Link—even a light one—was a big deal. There were rules I was supposed to follow, Guild rules sure, but rules. Ethics I used to buy into wholeheartedly; ethics I’d quoted to myself earlier when I decided to put my hand in the hornet’s nest that was the Guild. Ethically, I had to tell her. I had to tell her that we were bound together, by purpose or accident. I had to. But I couldn’t picture a version of that conversation in which I would come out unscarred.
I studied her. Straight posture, long brown hair in a ponytail, makeup today and a white shirt that on all the other female cops looked businesslike and on her looked sexy. Truthfully I didn’t want to tell her.
She laughed in a small burst. “You weren’t checking me out, were you?”
“No, of course not,” I lied, and smiled to soften it.
Wrong move. She looked away, like the slamming of a door.
I nodded politely at the waiter as he refilled our waters, but he was in and out too fast to notice.
“Are you okay?” I asked her. I hadn’t flirted, not really. I mean, if I had been flirting, it would have been a lot more—
“Fine,” she said, and set herself to eating again.
“I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s fine,” she said, and looked me in the eye. “Can we talk about something else?” I had no idea what she was thinking about at that moment.
“Sure,” I said. Maybe it wasn’t even a Link. Maybe I was overestimating the connection. And if it was, it was only a little, light one. Right? Either way I couldn’t tell her about it, not now, not with whatever this was on the table between us. I told the ethical part of me to shut up and go away.
The waiter came back with the check, and I gave him my humiliating cardboard Food Card. It wasn’t worth anything, just a handshake agreement with a few local restaurants for the department to pick up the tab. The accountant checked the expenditures every week. I’d complain, but they’d hired me again after I’d betrayed them. It still galled.
“Still got all those extra cases from Electronic Crimes?” I asked Cherabino.
She made a face. “Two more now.” She launched into a running commentary on the corrupt budgetary system keeping the cops’ hands tied.
I listened with half an ear, paying more attention to her mood, which was stabilizing as she fell back into her passion for justice. I ate my third California-style fish taco and asked the occasional question. Tried to figure out what I was going to do about my own problems.
I had the Guild to face if I was unlucky, Paulsen if I wasn’t, the case to solve either way. And I had the feeling that, no matter how good Cherabino was, I was going to be seeing more dead bodies. Hopefully none of them was mine.
On the way out of the restaurant, we ran into Branen. His expression was annoyed, but the feeling from him in Mindspace was tired and full of dread.
He held up a finger to silence the detective beside him. The man frowned.
Branen caught my eye. “If you think the Guild’s so important, you call them,” he said.
Beside me, Cherabino’s anger hit like a nuclear shock wave. She br
eathed through her teeth. “Calling the Guild, sir? You said we wouldn’t.”
Branen frowned at her. “Stay on top of your case, Cherabino. Boy wonder here thinks we need the Guild to hold our hands. Paulsen’s pushing for it.”
“Not hold our hands, give us names and data,” I said. Maybe some backup if I needed it.
“Whatever,” Branen said. “But if this goes south, you’ll be the one telling Captain Harris why the spooks started a fight.”
“It’s not—”
He cut me off. “Nice to see you, Cherabino.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. Furious, she grabbed my arm and marched me outside away from the restaurant.
Under the third streetlight, she turned. “How in hell do you get off on steamrolling me?”
Great. Now she was mad at me. “I told you, the—”
“You told me jack shit! I told you to follow orders for once in your life. You can’t just argue with the brass whenever something doesn’t go your way. We were at dinner. Talking. And you said nothing! If you were going to go over my head, you should at least have had the courtesy to tell me!” She took a big step forward.
I saw her seriously consider hitting me. Saw flashes of me on the ground, me hit in the balls, me immobilized in any one of ten judo moves while she broke my arms and called me names no lady should know. And at the end of it, I saw her chest heaving with angry breaths, her sensei’s voice giving her a lecture on nonviolence. She controlled herself, her jaw tight.
“There’s no need for violence,” I started carefully. But honestly I had no idea what else to say.
“You went over my head on my case. I brought you in. You talk to me—it’s courtesy! If you were a fucking cop, you’d know that.”
I held my ground, though she was in my personal space and blazing like a furnace. “I’m sorry, okay?”
Sadness hit her anger like a dampening cloth, but she set her jaw. “First apology you’ve given me since rehab,” she noted.
“It’s part of the steps,” I said. I hated apologies, steps or no. They were humiliating. But I’d done it then, and I’d do it again now, for her.
