Vacant

by Alex Hughes

  Tommy had a small burst of anger from next to me, and a picture of some kind of superhero fighting against the bruises. I only felt disgust at the kind of guy who could do that. It fit very well with the picture of a man accused of killing his mistress.

  “Objection, speculation,” the defense lawyer said from the front.

  “Sustained,” the judge said.

  The ADA waited a moment for that to sink in with the jury anyway. “Did you ever see one of them get their bruises?”

  She reluctantly said, “They have no bruises when they arrive. They have many when they leave. I do not hit them. Bron, the gardener, he does not hit them.”

  The ADA glanced toward the judge, then back at her. “Have you ever seen your employer hit them?”

  Mrs. Garces took in a shaky breath. “Yes, I see him hit them. I try not to see, but I see. It happens. But when they have visited, he no longer hits me or his wife. So I am grateful. Sometimes it is better when they come often.”

  “He hits you?” the ADA asked.

  She nodded and held on to the straps of her purse tightly. “It is good money. And it is not often.”

  “So Mr. Pappadakis has a history of violence with women,” the ADA said, pausing again with his good side toward the jury.

  “Objection,” the defense lawyer said. Next to him, Pappadakis was getting angry—his body language hadn’t changed much, but the anger was nearly pulsing off him in Mindspace.

  “In your experience,” the ADA said to Mrs. Garces.

  “I’ll allow it,” the judge said.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Garces said, very quietly, but it was like a bullet went off from a gun—Pappadakis’s reaction was so big. “Yes, he has much history with violence to women.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Garces,” the ADA said, with a big smile for the jury. “No more questions.”

  The defense lawyer, sweating a little, got up and asked a few obligatory questions about exactly when and where she’d seen evidence of things, trying to discredit her testimony in various ways. Unfortunately for him, Mrs. Garces stuck to her story and provided relevant details of enough different occasions that he ended up weakening his own case.

  He ended with “But you did not see what happened on the night of December the fourth, the night in question, when Miss Gilman arrived?”

  “No,” Mrs. Garces said in a clear voice. “No, I went to bed early with a sleeping pill. When I woke up the next morning, Bron had already found her. The gardener. She was dead. She had been beaten to death. They say to me she was beaten to death with a lamp. It is a horrible thing.”

  Beaten to death with a lamp, huh? I hadn’t liked Pappadakis on sight, but if he was the kind of guy who’d beat his mistress to death with a lamp, I liked him even less. Of course, he was on trial, not convicted, not yet.

  “Please stick to your direct knowledge,” Judge Parson instructed her. “Did you see her get beaten?”

  “No. No, I did not. As I said, I was asleep.”

  “So you do not know if he was involved in the crime,” the defense lawyer said. “The gardener could already have covered up the crime by the time you arrived, and then asked you to corroborate his story.”

  Mrs. Garces drew herself up to her short height and said clearly, “Bron Jones is a good man and very loyal to Mr. Pappadakis. He would never have hurt Ms. Gilman. Never. If anything, he would have defended her as he did us. He kept Lila, the cook—he defended her more than once. He did the same for me. That is the kind of man he is.”

  Well, that didn’t go as you’d planned, I thought, watching the defense lawyer try to recover from that. A low blow to go after the hired help for potential killers to get your client off, but it wouldn’t be the first time.

  I wondered how bad the beating really was. We’d clearly missed most of the critical testimony about it, but they didn’t have a clear connection to Pappadakis or they wouldn’t have bothered to ask Mrs. Garces about his history. Looking over at him sitting in the defense stand, however, I had no problem whatsoever imagining him beating his mistress to death. His suit was nice, but he had that shark vibe and plenty of strength in his blunt hands.

  And Fiske, with all he’d done and set up, wouldn’t have a single problem getting this guy off from a murder like that. He’d probably been the one to make their one and only witness disappear.

  It scared me, because if he had been willing to go that far, and maybe now help Pappadakis put pressure on the judge, what chance did I have?

  Loyola’s mind came toward mine down the hall behind us as the defense lawyer asked another few questions designed to put doubt on Bron, the landscaper, or Mrs. Garces. Apparently they’d already heard Bron’s testimony yesterday and he was trying hard to make it suspicious. I had no idea how it was coming off to the jury, but I could feel the lawyer’s calculated lies from across the room; he was doing everything in his power to pull attention off his client. The ethical lawyer thing to do, of course, but it didn’t make me like him all that much.

  The ADA had an objection that had the judge pull both lawyers up to the stand then.

  I felt Loyola’s mind enter the courtroom and come toward me. He sat down next to me, the wooden benches creaking. He had a small canvas bag, slightly open, that he set on the floor.

  I nodded at him; he nodded at me.

  “Hi,” Tommy said.

  “Hi,” Loyola returned. “What are you doing in here?”

  “I wanted to see what’s going on,” Tommy said.

  Loyola thought about that and then let it go.

  “What’s going on?” I asked him quietly.

  He pulled his bag to the bench next to himself. “I have news,” he said.

  After a glance at the action in the front of the courtroom, then back at Tommy, I nodded. Something I needed to know, I assumed, or he wouldn’t be interrupting.

  Loyola handed me a paper, one labeled PHONE TRANSCRIPT, a wiretap number, and then a date and time under the letterhead of the ATF, the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Federal Department, the group that Jarrod had said he was coordinating with.

  The transcript had someone calling a “special” number at a gun shop and ordering a set of very specific guns three days ago. It was a woman’s voice, they said. And the ATF official had written in on the margins that the guns they were ordering were at least five decades old, with restricted parts, and the codes they were using weren’t actually matches to the gun names, though they sounded right. The gun shop hadn’t asked for a name or explained the paperwork process to buy a gun, something that legally would take longer than three days. Instead they’d promised to have the order by the end of the week, asked about a silencer, and then quoted an obscene amount of money. “The junior rate,” they’d said. “Partial.” And then they’d set up a meeting place about half an hour outside the city. They’d had to get directions twice.

  At the end of the page, a scrawling set of handwriting guessed Hit? Work for hire of some kind. Flagged too late to tail.

  The timing was right for it to be the attack on Tommy. And judging from the military gear and the sloppiness of the attack, a gun shop was a good bet for where they found their customers.

  “We’ll need you to talk to the gun store owner tonight,” Loyola said to me, very quietly.

  I nodded, significantly, a promise. Loyola took the papers back and folded them into his bag.

  * * *

  Jarrod stopped by a small diner to get food, bringing back messy sacks of Reubens and fries. We ate in the car. Tommy was tired but was talking about the trial in a way I thought was probably healthy, considering. He ate more fries than sandwich, but I wasn’t his mother and at least it was food. I was tired too, my head hurting from a long, long day trying to monitor far too many minds moving in far too many directions.

  “Ready to visit the gun shop?” Jarrod asked me.

 
I swallowed my bite of the Reuben after chewing a moment. “It’s seven o’clock,” I said. “Don’t we need to get the kid home?”

  “I’m not a kindergartener,” Tommy said. And he was thinking his mom hadn’t been in a good mood today in court. He wasn’t looking forward to going home.

  “It’ll be a short trip. He can stay in the car. We’ve got his comic books,” Jarrod said flatly. “If you’re serious about helping with the investigation, I need you to talk to this gun store owner. Thus far the ATF has gotten nothing out of him and I need information.”

  I paused, trying to get a feel for whether Tommy was really okay with this. Whether I was really okay with this. A streetlight cast small squares of light onto the inside of the car. It was the only light around, the shadows deep.

  “We’re leaving now,” Jarrod said, and motioned for Loyola to pull the car out. I took a last bite of the sandwich and packed up the wrappers, mine and Tommy’s, in the bag. I cleaned my hands on a napkin and watched the buildings and lights of the city flow past.

  You okay? I asked Tommy.

  I’m okay, he said back awkwardly. It was one of the first times he’d sent a thought to me directly mind-to-mind, without me prompting him. He was coming a long way in a short time, I thought. I was still surprised the Guild hadn’t recruited him already. He was new, though, and couldn’t hide his exhaustion and overall fear from me.

  We moved down a street without streetlights then, and it got dark in the car for a moment.

  If you’ll follow us and stand around quietly, I’ll give you another telepathy lesson tonight, I told Tommy mind-

  to-mind.

  He lit up like a lightbulb, happiness and excitement spilling all over everything. I wished I shared his excitement.

  Why did I feel like I was lying to him? I intended to do the lesson and everything. I really did. Maybe Cherabino would have known what was wrong, but I didn’t. I’d have to figure all of this out totally on my own.

  We drove through several streets in Savannah until we ended up at a long concrete box with bars on the window, which looked rougher than the one (and only) gun shop and range Cherabino had taken me to a few months ago. One lone streetlight sputtered overhead, a half-dead bioluminescent bush in a median in the cracked parking lot looking like it hadn’t had any water in years.

  The sign above the concrete front said HARD KNOCKS in harsh lettering, with a single painted gunshot hole, with a ragged edge.

  Mendez and Jarrod went ahead, to introduce themselves to the gun shop owner; I collected myself, finally getting out once I was sure there were no minds around likely to be an issue for Tommy. The surroundings felt . . . too empty actually. Much too empty, though I couldn’t put my finger on any particular reason why.

  My feet weren’t used to dress shoes, and so the blisters of the day rubbed as I walked across the parking lot, low-level distracting pain. I’d had to learn to ignore much worse as part of my Guild training, so it wasn’t a deal breaker. I’d have to peel off the socks and treat the things so they didn’t get infected later. But the pain was a useful focuser, a useful distraction to keep me thinking about everything in my life that could go wrong.

  I felt Tommy’s impatience a step behind me. And a sudden burst of emotion from Jarrod in Mindspace ahead, tamped down all too suddenly. I walked in the front door, which they’d already opened, and saw why.

  Lying on the floor was someone I presumed was the gun shop owner, shot in the chest at least twice, the blooming blood on his shirt already drying into that funny brown-red, limbs already stiffening in rigor mortis.

  “I take it you did not expect a crime scene in here?” I asked Jarrod, blocking Tommy’s view of the scene with my body. Just in time, felt like.

  “Hey, I want to see,” he said.

  “No, you don’t,” I said.

  Jarrod sighed, and walked over to the wall, where a phone hung.

  CHAPTER 13

  Once I got Loyola to watch Tommy in the car, just a few feet away from the gun shop, I convinced Jarrod to let me read the scene.

  I dived into Mindspace, stupidly, completely blind, and without an anchor. Cherabino should have been there, should have provided the real-world anchor for me, should have held out that mental hand to keep me grounded and finding my way back. I missed her again suddenly. I missed her being here.

  But I was too embarrassed, too self-conscious to ask my new boss—or worse, Loyola—for help in all of this. I’d manage. I’d manage if it killed me. And it might. Mindspace wasn’t the safest place in the world.

  Swartz would disapprove of foolish risks if asked. He’d also understand the need to feel strong, or at least I hoped he would. We’d doubtlessly be talking about it at length at our next morning coffee meeting.

  I took deep breaths, forcing myself to focus. Scattered thoughts were dangerous enough in the real world; in Mindspace, you ran the risk of losing your way or losing yourself, worse still without an anchor. I could do this. I must.

  The world grayed out, disappearing into the not-quite sight of a world without light, like the depths of the ocean, or the world of a bat, all reflected waves and heard realities. I sank deeper, until I saw the rapidly filling in hole where a mind used to be. The death, sitting in the middle of the room above the body. He’d been killed here, but then again I think we’d known that.

  I approached the area where I thought the killer should have been standing, the angle of the gun having shot from this end of the space. There—there. I knew that mind.

  Sibley.

  A frisson of fear overcame me, but I pushed it back. All too easy to get lost in your own fears in Mindspace; Mindspace was receptive, after all, and all too often would help you along the way, would echo your own fears until the feedback loop shut you down. If you let it. If you were powerful enough, and sadly I was just that powerful.

  I breathed, deeply, in and out, letting the real world of my body and my lungs intrude here until I calmed.

  A small spot here. Near the satisfied mind brimming over with the gunshots, with the violent control. With the win. But there—there—was that small spot. An aberration. A fuzzy blob where, like the water around a rock in a stream, Mindspace had moved around something here.

  Sibley had his gadget, the thing that had controlled me the last time I’d seen him. He had it now, and all my worries would be for nothing if he brought it and I couldn’t counter its influence. I’d stayed up late several nights trying to figure it out, trying to come up with a counter. I was out of time.

  I surfaced, fear trailing after me like smoke in air.

  Last time we met, he’d almost killed me. And worse, that thing—that sphere he held, taken from the research of a Guild girl who’d thrown her lot in with Fiske—had made him able to control me. He’d tell me to jump and I jumped, literally, unable to keep my mind, my body from obeying. It was crude, suggestibility only, nothing specific, but if I couldn’t counter it, he could come right up to me on the street and tell me to give him Tommy, and maybe I would.

  I’d have to figure out a way to stop this thing in its tracks, and soon.

  My heart sped up, and I surfaced out of Mindspace only just, only barely escaping my own fear.

  * * *

  I told Jarrod what I’d found, holding back the machine but telling him about Sibley. Jarrod made a thoughtful face. A face, and some floating diffuse thoughts, and nothing else. “I need to make some more phone calls,” he said. “We need to be able to track this guy’s movements.”

  “Do you think you really can?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. The ATF’s guy tracked him back to a meeting with three local toughs he’s apparently hired. They’ve got something in the works, but right now we’re a step behind.”

  “Oh,” I said. I didn’t know what to add, or how to add it. I didn’t know if I could even talk about the device without st
arting a major incident with the Guild or worse.

  But I knew what I was going to do. I knew what I had to do, to stop the vision from happening and have some chance to get back to Cherabino in time. I knew what I had to do to survive this.

  My priority was Tommy and his safety, so Loyola and I were sent from the crime scene back to the house along with Sridarin, who worked for the sheriff and whom I hadn’t spent much time with, since he was guarding the judge.

  After we checked in with all the major players and his mom said hello, Tommy asked me about the lesson.

  “In a little while,” I said.

  “You said tonight. My bedtime’s in an hour,” he said.

  “I know. I’ll hurry,” I said. “I have to work.”

  He made a nasty face then and slunk down to his room, thinking I was just like all the other stupid grown-ups.

  It hurt, not only the reflected emotional thing from him, but it hurt me to be put in a category with all the adults in his life who had failed him. I wasn’t that guy. I didn’t want to be that guy. But if I had a snowball’s chance in hell of keeping the vision from happening, there were certain things I had to do.

  I dialed the number to the Guild’s public relations office by heart. Kara’s number. Kara was my ex-fiancée, currently married to someone else. She was one of the few people in the world in a position to get me what I needed—if she would. She also owed me from a few months ago.

  She picked up. “Hello?”

  “You work too many hours,” I said, “and this is coming from someone who works with workaholics.”

  Kara made that clicking sound with her teeth I found so annoying. “No one asked you to criticize me. If you’re calling about the debt, I swear there’s nothing I can do. The Guild is changing its credit policies to increase cash reserves. That’s applying to everyone—including the rank and file. If anything, you’re getting a better deal than most.”

  I paused. Wait. This wasn’t just a specific attack against me? “What in the world does the Guild need a ton of cash for?” I asked, a chill going down my spine. Probably another Guild First warmonger position; I’d run into their radical ideas a few months ago when I worked for the Guild to pay off a large portion of my debt working a murder case. At Kara’s request.