Vacant

by Alex Hughes

  There was no choice, not really.

  I breathed for approximately forever, in and out, pushing down my internal demons. It was a battle, a real battle, with real blood and sweat. But I already knew its conclusions, and the part of me that wanted the drug did too.

  So I closed the box and tried to think what to do with it. I was exhausted, now worse than ever. I could break the vial and throw away the glass, destroying the drug—part of me felt actual pain at that thought—but I didn’t want to expose the hotel staff to the glass, and I didn’t want Jarrod or anyone else finding the vial if I threw it away. The dumpster outside had been overflowing already.

  After a few minutes of temptation one way and the other, I wrapped up the box and the note in a pillowcase and stuck it in a desk drawer. Probably no one would look there, and it would give me some more time.

  Then I called Swartz. Selah picked up.

  “Yes, it’s an emergency,” I said, and waited while she got him.

  A minute later, Swartz’s gruff voice picked up. “What’s wrong?”

  I closed my eyes in relief. Such relief. I didn’t have to do this alone. “It . . . it’s a bad time, Swartz. I need you to talk me down.”

  And he did. With no hesitation, for an hour or more, Swartz sat there and talked to me. Reminded me of all the things I believed in now that I wanted more than just a drug, reminded me of Cherabino, and the department, and being an interrogator. Reminded me of the program, and him.

  Reminded me that I really wasn’t alone.

  After it was all done, I stripped off belt and shoes, pants and shirt, and fell into the bed.

  I was asleep almost before my head hit the pillow.

  * * *

  I woke to the sound of a ringing phone, high pitched and loud. I groped for the phone, somewhere on the nightstand, and found the lamp instead.

  RiiiiiIIIIiiiiing, the thing rang, horribly loud, as I switched on the light. There . . . there was the phone.

  I picked up the receiver. “Mmmph?”

  “A-a-adam?” Cherabino’s voice came through, wobbly.

  “Isabella?” I asked, sitting up. Every fear I had rolled over me, all at once. “What’s going on?”

  She took in a wobbly breath, and I could hear the tears she was suppressing. “They did it. They put the whole damn system so much in knots—they found me guilty.”

  I rubbed my eyes, heart beating far too fast now. “Guilty of what exactly?” I asked, afraid.

  “Police brutality and wrongful death. They said I’m lucky the family’s not suing and I don’t get a murder charge. Lucky!” She laughed, a bitter, broken sound. “I’ll have police brutality and wrongful death on my permanent record for the rest of my life.”

  My stomach knotted. “What? Are you sure?”

  Now she did cry, long sobs into the phone, no words. It broke my heart, and I didn’t know what to do. Isabella didn’t cry. She just . . . she didn’t cry.

  “You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said, hurting for her, hurting for me, afraid for her. “I was there. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “It’s on my record.” She sobbed again, the crying taking on an angry, frustrated tone.

  “But you didn’t do it.”

  “It doesn’t matter! IA determinations can’t be appealed. If it wasn’t for the union . . .” Another angry sob. “Bastards.”

  “But I know what really happened. Branen believes you, right?”

  It took her another few breaths to be able to speak, and when she did it was heavy with defeat. “It doesn’t matter what he believes. It’s the determination, and it’s in the papers now. His hands are tied.”

  I felt hollow. “What will they do? You can’t—” I couldn’t even bring myself to say it out loud. Her job was everything to her, literally everything, her whole life. And her job was a big part of my life too, a part of the system that kept me on the wagon and sane. “Will you still be a detective?” I asked finally, unable to help myself. What would she do if she wasn’t?

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. The brass are reviewing the files. They’ll have a decision in the next few days. Branen said he wanted to do it out of the media limelight, that it would be better for everyone that way.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked, worried for her.

  “I don’t know.” She took a breath. “Maybe they bust me back to traffic, maybe I’m Michael’s assistant now. I don’t know how in hell I’m going to earn my way back, not after this kind of mark, but I’m going to try. I have to try. This is the kind of thing that destroys people’s careers.”

  “You have the highest close rate in the department,” I protested, trying to make myself believe they wouldn’t fire her. They couldn’t. It might destroy her.

  “It doesn’t matter. The mayor wants to be seen as against brutality, at least that’s what he said at the press conference today. I made the mistake of watching it. People forget the commissioner is appointed, but times like this . . .”

  “If he doesn’t keep the mayor happy, he loses his job.”

  “Yeah. Branen told me.”

  She’d stopped crying, but the silence on the other end of the phone—and the other end of our weak, distant Link—was still vacant, devastated.

  “If this goes badly for me . . .” She trailed off.

  “What?” I asked.

  “When you asked about the private eye thing, us opening one on our own, was that a joke?”

  I paused. “Not if you don’t want it to be.”

  She took another shuddery breath. “Let’s keep that on the back burner for now.”

  I took a breath. If she was thinking next steps, that was a good sign. Maybe she wouldn’t fall apart. Maybe. “I know you’d rather be a cop, even if they bust you down to traffic,” I said. “It’s okay. I know your job is your life.”

  “It’s not my whole life.” Then, after a second: “I feel bad. If I’m not at the department, I don’t know if they’ll give you the hours.”

  I tried to figure out what she was really asking. “Branen hasn’t let me work with you in six weeks anyway. He already doesn’t like me. He decided that I was worth the aggravation, or at least he has so far.”

  “Let’s hope he keeps thinking that,” she said.

  Now I was afraid. I’d been worried for Cherabino, sure, but with all that had been going on I hadn’t even stopped to consider that I might lose my last hours of work at the department as well. I wished she hadn’t brought that up. Now I was worried for me too.

  Suddenly she said in a rush, “I know it’s late, I know you’re on a job, I know there’re all sorts of reasons why you can’t, but could you come here? At least be here when they tell me?”

  “I thought you didn’t want me in the building even,” I said, my heart sinking.

  “I . . . I know I said that.” She took another breath. “Look, forget I asked, okay? It’s just . . . it’s just really . . .”

  “I wish I could be there right now, I really do, but I can’t,” I said quietly, and opened up the Link as far as it would go. It wasn’t the total presence from earlier, but I could feel her, and I thought she could feel me.

  I pictured wrapping her up in my arms and whispering compliments in her ear, I pictured all the warmth and comfort I had in me, and then made some up. I sent it all, all I had, and my fear and heartbreak for her went too.

  She sniffled over the phone and gave a little sigh. Just a little one, like maybe it had done some good.

  She relaxed in my mental arms, put her head on my chest, and held on. I hung up the phone, gently, and held on too. It was an incredible amount of mental energy to keep up the contact over such a long distance, and it probably strengthened the Link. Right now I didn’t care. She wasn’t alone either, and she needed to know that.

  I held her like that, mind-to-min
d, for at least half an hour, until she fell asleep. And then I let it go. My head pounded dully, and what little rest I’d gotten had just been obliterated.

  I got up, pulled on my pants, and sat in the office chair, the light from the lamp spilling over on the other side of the room sparring with the red reflected-neon-sign light coming through the blinds. I sat there and thought, my feet getting cold, my back getting cold.

  Could I really save Tommy? And if I couldn’t, did I have any business at all staying here, when I could go back to Atlanta, back to Cherabino? Showing up for Cherabino was different from the drug, I told myself, but I didn’t believe it.

  I would be a coward and a failure one way or the other: a kid’s life or Cherabino’s real need when her world was disintegrating. I tried, rubbing my bleary eyes, to figure out what Swartz would want me to do.

  I felt torn, unthinkably torn. It was too early to call Swartz, probably. Five a.m. In another hour, maybe.

  There was a knock on the door. It was Jarrod’s mind, and it was as buttoned-up and overcontrolled as I’d ever seen it.

  I answered the door, still in my undershirt and the wrinkled pants from last night. “What is it?” I asked.

  He passed me a photograph, grainy and on thin paper like it had been photocopied. In it, Tommy sat on a chair, purpling bruise on his face, mouth split, holding up a copy of a newspaper dated this morning.

  TELL THE TRUTH OR HE DIES, a note said, cut from newspaper letters, also photocopied.

  CHAPTER 21

  “Where did you get this?” I asked Jarrod. I felt like I was in free fall, helpless. Oddly, though, there was some relief mixed in with everything else.

  Tommy looked bad, looked scared and dehydrated and poorly cared for. My heart broke. He was still alive, though. He was still alive, though his eyes looked dead. Whoever had him could have done anything.

  And I might have left him for the drug, or for Cherabino. I might have failed him yet again. The certainty felt like a two-edged sword. I had no choice. He was alive, and there was that vision. Cherabino would have to wait, whatever it cost her, whatever it cost us, me. Because somewhere—maybe—Tommy was alive, and maybe I could save him.

  So why did I feel like the world had just turned into confetti? Why did I feel like such an aching failure?

  “Wh-wh-where did you get this?” I repeated to Jarrod.

  “Sridarin saw a teenager delivering it at the judge’s house half an hour ago.” His eyes were sympathetic.

  “I thought we were all supposed to leave,” I said. My hands still shook from the emotions, the overwhelming emotions. I struggled to think.

  “Sridarin takes his responsibility on protection duty very seriously,” Jarrod said. “He stayed behind on stakeout, just in case, and it’s a good thing he did. We have the teenager in custody, but he’s not talking. Can you take the location from his mind like you did the other?”

  I paused, brain literally stuck for a moment. “Um, yeah.” I held open the door. “Come in while I get a shirt on.”

  He did and my brain finally turned on.

  “Can I have an opinion?” I said.

  “Of course.”

  I took a breath, wanted a cigarette, wanted Satin, wanted to be anywhere—anywhere—but stuck between these choices. But I was finally thinking. “To be honest, I think we need to lean on the judge. Whatever is going on, she’s at the center of it. That’s what the note tells me. I know interrogations. I think she cracks first.”

  Jarrod nodded and stepped in, the door closing behind him. Judging from the deep circles under his eyes, he hadn’t slept much more than I had. “I still need a location for where the teenager got the photocopy.”

  “I have nowhere else to be at this moment,” I said. I pulled on a clean shirt, buttoning it. “We’ll do what we need to do.”

  Mendez met us out front, a carrying case of coffees in her hand. For the first time, I felt fear from her, true fear.

  In my experience, when the cop gets afraid, you should be terrified.

  “Tommy’s not going to live, is he?” I asked, once we were in the car.

  A short silence while the two of them tried to figure out how to respond. Jarrod put on the anti-grav engine, floating up into traffic, and made a show of being very busy with that. Finally he said, “I have a hostage negotiator driving in from Atlanta. He’ll be here in a few hours. If we can get them talking . . .”

  “Have they called?” I asked. “Do we have any contact information from them at all?”

  “Nothing but the phone call you picked up the other day,” Mendez said. “And we don’t even have a recording of that one. If they’re communicating with the judge some other way, we don’t know about it. No letters, even, except the one we showed you.”

  “So unless we get them talking, you think he dies.”

  Resounding silence in the car. My heart broke.

  A few minutes later, struggling to stay on topic, I said, “In the vision, I’m there with Tommy, at least mentally. And I’m talking to Fiske over the phone. If I get a chance to talk with him, what do I say?”

  Mendez turned all the way around in her seat again. “You’re sure you talked to Fiske? And Fiske has some influence on the man who took this child?”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  “You bargain,” Mendez said. “Hostage taking is never about the hostage. It’s always about power, or respect, and or some third, difficult-to-obtain goal. If you can calm this guy down and negotiate with him, it’s possible we all walk away from this.”

  “What do I possibly have to offer Fiske?” I asked, thinking of the drug he’d left me. “He’s not exactly a fan of mine.”

  “Everybody wants something. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I’m far more interested in exactly where this man is. If we can get there rather than negotiate, it’s better for everyone.”

  “It’s an abandoned barn in the vision, I told you that,” I said.

  “There are countless abandoned barns within a hundred miles,” Jarrod said. “If you can keep him talking and get additional information about his location, we can send in a special unit to talk this out. The FBI has a hostage retrieval unit on standby—they have helicopters, and they’re ready to scramble. But there’s no point until we know where he is. How soon do you talk to this guy?”

  “I have no idea! It’s not like I can call this stuff up out of the void.” I’d tried for another vision already and failed. At this point, though, I wouldn’t want to get another vision. If all of this led to Tommy’s death, led to the ending I saw in the vision, I didn’t want to know. I had to believe I could change it. I had to. It was the only thing keeping me sane right now.

  Jarrod let out a sigh, like he’d been wanting me to do just that, to call up mystical answers. He was going to be disappointed.

  “We’re all on edge,” Mendez said. “Let’s see what the judge says.”

  Jarrod changed skylanes, as cautiously and controlled as everything else he did. “Mendez, I want you to meet up with Sridarin and get a location out of that teenager. I don’t care what you have to do. Then go there and see if there’s evidence. You can have the car once we’re at the house.”

  “Don’t you need backup with the judge?” Mendez asked.

  “I will handle the judge with Ward here.”

  She nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  * * *

  Sridarin was waiting for us on the sidewalk of the judge’s house, in a long trench coat. Under the streetlight, his face was half in shadow, but from what I could feel in Mindspace, he was grim. “I have bad news.”

  I stopped midstride.

  “What’s going on?” Jarrod asked.

  “You remember the jury was held over the weekend because they couldn’t come to a decision? Anyway, they all received envelopes under their hotel room doors this morning be
fore anyone could waylay them. The security camera we set up surreptitiously was disabled. We have no footage of the perpetrator.”

  “What was in the envelopes?”

  Sridarin shook his head. “It’s the same picture the judge received, of her son in obvious distress. Helpfully labeled with who his mother is. The jury is panicking, and I suspect there will now be a mistrial.”

  Whoa. It seemed impossible to believe that Fiske had won—and won so quickly. An overwhelming sense of guilt and responsibility rode me, and rode me hard. I wanted to be somewhere, anywhere but here, dealing with this.

  “Why a mistrial?” Mendez asked.

  “With the sequestration, the pictures are going to seem like credible threats. It’s all over. Jury tampering is a felony, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t give the perpetrators what they want in this case.”

  “That’s not our issue right now,” Jarrod said. He was overly controlled again, his emotions muffled like a tuning fork against a piece of velvet. “Is the judge awake?”

  “She’s awake—the light has been on for an hour—but she’s not letting anyone in or answering the phone,” Sridarin said.

  “Thanks for the update,” Jarrod said, and moved past him.

  Sridarin just looked at the man, reacting to his rudeness.

  “It’s been a rough morning,” Mendez said. “Thanks for sharing. You going to be here for a while?”

  “I’d like to actually be in the house if that’s a possibility.” He still felt driven and a little guilty, but with the forward motion, better. I knew how he felt.

  “Come with us,” Mendez said, and we followed.

  * * *

  Jarrod talked us into the house and gave the judge a copy of the photo.

  I could feel the photo hit her like a blow to the head. She closed her eyes.

  Parson sat down on the closest chair, still ten feet away, the strange egg-shaped thing that I’d interviewed the bodyguard on. Her hands were shaking, her mind caught in some horrific processing loop.