Sharp: A Mindspace Investigations Novel

by Alex Hughes

  “Kara, it’s not your fault,” I said. It was mine. Mine for getting distracted, mine for not putting it together.

  And then she was back, her voice matter-of-fact, too matter-of-fact. “I’ll get you the time and place by courier in the next hour.”

  “Thank you.”

  She took a breath. “You should know. We went through her work papers. There’s a . . . well, a sketch. A highly technical sketch for a, shall we say, box to influence brain waves. Our technical people in the research department say it’s sound, and that it’s developed enough to work in the real world. They claim they haven’t seen it before.”

  I paused. If the Guild—if Kara—was sharing this, there was reason to be concerned. “Okay. Well, she worked for Dane. She had access to his research just like I did.”

  “And there’s some parts missing from the Guild research labs.”

  “Great,” I said. “Just great.” This was turning into the perfect storm.

  * * *

  I found Morris in front of the public coffee table upstairs in the detectives’ cubicle area, her standing impatiently while the closet coffeepot spat air and hot water, steam and a sour, almost-coffee-beans smell across the area. Upstairs in the detectives’ cubicle area felt deserted, fewer people here than there used to be. I told myself they were just out on cases, but I knew some of them—most, probably—had been laid off.

  “There’s a stash over the microwave in the food closet. They’re real coffee beans.”

  Morris scowled, her Valkyrie-like features fierce. If I hadn’t been so used to Cherabino, I might have stepped back. I should have felt her intentions along with it, but now, midafternoon, I had to concentrate to pick up anything from a normal. “All I could find was the fake stuff. The pot they had on had been sitting all day. It looked like a hockey puck.”

  “Probably similar.”

  As the mechanism finished its brew cycle, she darted in to fix a cup of it anyway. She must have needed the caffeine pretty badly; the circles under her eyes were deep and she moved like she’d been up far too many hours. I spent the effort to read her and found her exhaustion was deep and wide. Maybe she hadn’t slept at all.

  “I need your help,” I said. “I have information about where the hijackers are dropping their goods this afternoon. We have a couple of hours before it happens.”

  She blinked. “The hijackers who took out a high-security silicon chips shipment last night? Those hijackers? Where did you get this information?”

  “I only got it a little while ago,” I said. “And . . . let’s just say it’ll be inadmissible in court and you probably don’t want me to give you the details.” Since Cherabino was gone, I didn’t have an easy way to introduce Kara’s information unless I went through Paulsen—which seemed bad for my job security. And the clock was ticking. I was hoping Morris would take the information without a lot of questions.

  A slow, dangerous smile spread across her face. “Let me finish the coffee and we’ll pack up.”

  * * *

  I knew the area, or I had known it, years ago and high as a kite. Things looked different now, in full daylight, after the city had started a reclamation project on the old industrial complexes, now apartments for yuppies. Aircar garages on the roofs, the ground-level entrances locked up tighter than the police holding cells, local businesses in the area still sporting heavy iron bars. The only people walking carried small packages and wore jackets just large enough to conceal firearms, even in the middle of summer, and the streets two blocks down from the apartments still never seemed to get clean.

  The abandoned school building was still there, though, smaller and shabbier than I remembered it, bricks falling down into the alley. It was surrounded on all sides with dirt and squatters, a veritable haven for shady deals of all types. This used to be Marge’s territory, back when I still knew all the players.

  We sat on the crumbling top floor of the building across the way, looking down into the now-empty alleyway in back of the school. A tattered awning and piles of dirty boxes were its only decoration. There were unmarked police cars and uniforms on foot sequestered in various hiding places around the area, and plenty more sat waiting and ready to move when the hijackers finally arrived.

  The trouble was, they had been due to arrive half an hour ago. Morris, crouching next to me on the gritty floor, shifted. She was getting restless; I could see it in her body language and in occasional flashes of impatience darting through the fog of Mindspace like minnows through a cloudy lake.

  “What’s the time?” she whispered, maybe the twelfth round of the same question.

  I told her.

  She shifted again, her legs getting tired, as the radio on her hip sputtered faintly, almost white noise.

  “Give it another minute,” I said for the dozenth time, but it was falling flat, even to my ears.

  Morris glanced back at me, then pulled her radio from her belt and turned up the volume. “Units in Tango Charlie, this is a Ten Fifty-Nine. Repeat, Tango Charlie, this is a false alarm. Let’s go home, folks.”

  Through the broken window in front of us, I could see a couple of uniforms round a corner, rifles held loosely pointed to the ground. Not too far away I could hear the high-pitched humming sound of a fusion engine warming up as a police aircar went from idle and cold to ready to fly.

  Morris’s hand with the radio was halfway back to her belt when a string of numbers and urgent calls for backup hit the airwaves. “Hijackers!” the broadcaster finally said in the department’s preferred plain-language call. “Repeat, multiple fatalities and restricted materials missing from Al’s Secure Computer Depot, Clairmont Road, next to the Veterans Hospital. All units available, backup. Back-up immediately. Black industrial flyer heading north through restricted airspace, no tags. All units. All units, pursue.”

  Adrenaline soaked the air as every cop in the area stopped everything—but we were at least thirty miles out of the way. We’d been caught with our pants down.

  Morris stared me directly in the eye. “I swear to you by all that is holy, if you’re working for them, if you set this up so that area would be empty—”

  “I wouldn’t—”

  “—I will find out, and I will bury you.”

  “I didn’t—”

  But she was already down the stairs, leaving me to catch up as best I could.

  CHAPTER 23

  By the time I got back to the department, it was almost quitting time. Morris was at the computer store, going through evidence. And I—well, I’d been left on the side of the road like so much baggage.

  I looked up from my borrowed desk at the sound of running shoes across the hard tile of the main walkway, maybe fifteen feet away. It was Michael, running. Where was he running to? What was going on?

  “Stop running!” the dispatch officer called out.

  “Sorry.” Michael dropped into a trot.

  With the advantage of angles, I headed him off at the front door, arriving out of breath. “Is Cherabino okay?” I panted. I thought I’d probably know through the Link, but I hadn’t felt much from her for hours and now he was running. . . .

  “She’s fine. Murder scene, priority, across the city,” Michael said. “I just located Hamilton.”

  “The husband we couldn’t find? Can I come?” If I sat at that desk any longer, I’d probably do something stupid. Like force myself onto the team interrogating the witnesses to the hijacking—not the thing to do if anyone was suspecting me of aiding them. And Kara had forbidden me to call her again for at least another hour.

  “You can come, but we need to move. Now.”

  “You got it.” I was tired; it was late. But I wasn’t that tired.

  He held the door for me. “Cherabino’s not in on this one. This is a rough bar.”

  It took me a second to figure out what he was asking. “I’ll be able to handle myself. I have battle training.”

  A small nod. “We’ve got a patrol car requisitioned.”

&
nbsp; A second later he was halfway down the front steps of the building. I had to hustle to catch up, lungs panting in the polluted afternoon air.

  * * *

  Michael parked in the middle of a seedy-looking parking lot in a run-down strip mall south of Decatur. The front of the lot was dominated by the remains of what once had been an air-traffic routing station for computer-controlled aircars, dismantled in the aftermath of the Tech Wars, all the parts yanked out and the empty rusting shell left. It said a lot about the area of town we were in that no one had bothered to take it down; an empty molding mattress took up most of the inside, while the outside was graffiti upon graffiti, but it still stood. Even the red kudzu climbing over the concrete walls looked dull, its color fading as its bioengineered cells began to lose the battle against the pollution it was supposed to be clearing.

  Most of the shops in the strip mall were closed for good, another having an Out of Business sale, and a title pawn and the bar anchored the rest of the rotting building. The parking lot was cracked and unpainted, and cars parked at odd angles. More than a few vans left the lot right after the police car pulled in. It was that kind of neighborhood.

  Michael put the car in gear and hesitated.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Well . . .”

  I waited, trying to open up enough to understand what the hesitation was about. Michael wasn’t particularly loud in Mindspace, so I didn’t get a whole lot from him unless I meant to. I strained, reaching out, and found he was thinking I wasn’t a cop. It didn’t give me an idea of what the holdup was. I made myself wait him out, and watched one very dim and transient flash of light spark on my right side. For this late in the day, even that was a great sign. I was healing, and steadily.

  “Okay,” Michael said, seeming to come to a decision. “You don’t have a badge, so I can’t send you in by yourself. And the whole back of the place seems to butt up against the interstate; I don’t think he’s going to get anywhere else quickly. So we’ll both go in the front door and see what there is to see. If we have to run him down, we’ll run him down.”

  “Do we have to run?” My lungs didn’t like anything over a walk.

  “Probably. This guy’s been hiding. I don’t think he’s going to come along quietly.”

  “I’ll keep up,” I promised, but vowed to myself that I wouldn’t be running.

  The sign at the bar said PEG LEGS, with a faded drawing of a pirate with a disturbing smile. The windows were too dirty to see into, and there was an extremely large cockroach with mottled blue spots on its blackish carapace working at a bit of rotten food on the sidewalk. It skittered away as we approached. Another bioengineered cleaning creature, maybe. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness of the interior of the bar. To the left was a rotting wooden bar, black spots near the floor, metal bar stools spotted with rust, and to the left a small lake of beat-up tables. The place smelled strongly of old sour beer, urine, and dirt. Not the good clean smell of dirt freshly turned in a garden, but the old, nasty, speckled smell of a back alleyway covered in old filth. The patrons, who looked as dirty as the surroundings, stared at us. None of them was Hamilton.

  “Nice place,” I said to Michael.

  “There a private room in the back?” he asked the bartender currently glowering at us. When he got no response, he flashed the badge. We pretended not to notice the large numbers of patrons pulling out money and packing up to leave.

  “What’s it to you?” The bartender was a short, round guy with the stub of a cigar in his mouth. How he talked with the cigar in place was one of the mysteries of the ages.

  Michael moved to the bar, apparently ignoring the patrons, though his body language—and position—showed he was on alert more than usual. “I’m looking for a man by the name of Dan Hamilton. I’ve been told he’s here. And unless you want me to call in a query on your liquor license at the health inspector’s office, I’d recommend you help me find him.”

  The bartender chewed on the end of the cigar for a moment, then pushed a glass aside. He pointed down to the end of the bar. “First door there is the third door on the right in the hallway.”

  Small, beady eyes watched us as we walked the length of the bar, past suspicious and angry-looking patrons. The mental smell in here was worse than the physical.

  Oddly enough, the back hallway was relatively clean, with only the faint smell of cigarette smoke and peanuts to distinguish it. The floor had piled boxes of foodstuffs along one wall, with the first door open to show the mop and paper products of a supply closet. The second door was closed. The third was. . . .

  I felt the mind before I saw it, sudden panic shouting loud enough I could feel it dully without even trying. The door flew open and Michael staggered back; it had hit him in the face.

  Dan Hamilton, the tall, beefy white guy we’d been searching for, staggered out of the room, his appearance ragged and his fear strong enough to smell. He dug in his heels and made a break for it, getting maybe six steps down the hall toward the sign marked EXIT before I could react.

  Michael was running too then, with the solid commitment of someone who was going to catch the suspect or die trying.

  I looked at the hallway, Hamilton just now reaching the outside door. I looked at Michael, still too far behind.

  I sighed and ran to the end of the hall, lungs gasping.

  Hamilton hit the back alleyway, a long horizontal space with nowhere to go other than back around the side of the building to the front parking lot. And he put in a burst of speed, serious speed, outdistancing Michael. Who was this guy, an Olympic runner?

  I stopped cold in the alleyway, struggling for air. No way I was going to catch him on foot. It was afternoon—I was tired. But I had to try. I reached out, mind straining, and connected with his. I had him down and disabled before my telepathy gave out, my vision overcome with stars, pain bursting like fireworks. He slowed down, quickly, and slumped, in stages, to the ground.

  Michael caught up, breathing hard, and pulled Hamilton’s slack arms into alloy strongcuffs. He checked his pulse and seemed satisfied. Only then did he turn around to look back at me.

  “That was you?”

  I nodded, still breathing hard. The pain was starting to ease as I walked over, but my brain was not happy with me. Suddenly I was having trouble reading the sign across the way, and Mindspace had disappeared. I’d be fine in the morning, probably, but I was done—out—for the day.

  Michael frowned, looked down at Hamilton, who was currently sleeping the sleep of the dead, drool and all. “Next time, get him before I have to do the hundred-yard dash, okay?”

  I nodded, then tried to figure out how to ask. Oh, hell. “That didn’t bother you?” Most normals would be freaking out and asking lots of questions about whether he was going to wake up and whether I was going to do that to them next.

  “Not really,” Michael said. “Beats the hell out of a stun gun. You reloadable?”

  “What?”

  “Can you do more than one of these in a chase?”

  “I’m not at full capacity right now, but normal circumstances? I don’t know, maybe three or four in a row before I need a break. Why?”

  He shook his head. “Damn shame. If we had more of you out on patrol—well, it’s a damn shame.” I stayed with Hamilton as he went to go get the car for transport. Wow. It was the nicest thing anyone had said about me in years.

  And he’d done it while I’d panted my lungs out in the middle of the chase in front of him. Huh.

  Michael kept surprising me.

  * * *

  “He’s finally woken up,” Bellury told me quietly the next morning, in the hallway outside the cleanest interview room. I had the door cracked so I could keep an ear out for the suspect I was currently interviewing, a hysterical woman with a flair for dramatics who I was almost certain had been running restricted weapons across state lines for the last six months. As expected, the hysterics went from loud to nonexistent when I left the r
oom. Then, too late, a whimper pitched to come through the partially opened door.

  I sighed. “Hamilton? After sleeping all night, he’s waking up now?”

  He nodded.

  “And Cherabino’s still out in the field. See if Michael has a minute and see if you can find the man a cup of coffee, please. I need to finish this one up before I can do anything else. She’s on the edge of letting the act slip, I think.”

  Bellury shrugged. “Coffee’s not going to do it with Hamilton. He’s been begging for a cigarette for the last ten minutes solid. I had to take the things from him twice—apparently he had a holdout stash.”

  Great. And DeKalb County ordinances wouldn’t allow smoking indoors for suspects for any reason up to and including imminent death. “I’ll see if I can’t take him out back later. Think he’s going to run once he’s outside?” It could be dangerous to knock him out twice in twenty-four hours with mind tricks, and that didn’t look good to a jury. My Abilities had only sparked one police brutality charge, and I’d like to keep it to that one. Plus I felt good this morning and didn’t want to waste the mental juju on knocking him out.

  “Might do ankle cuffs to be sure,” Bellury said thoughtfully.

  “That’s a good idea.”

  “I’ll get us a pair with the coffee.”

  “Thanks.” I took a minute to compose myself, and went back into the room. The hysterics resumed, grating on my nerves like sandpaper on a skinned knee. She knew she was being recorded, right? Even when I wasn’t in the room?

  “Mrs. Clamp,” I began.

  The rest of the interview took twelve minutes—four to catch her in a lie, three to press my advantage and intimidation factor, and five to record her confession.

  “Thank you for coming in, Mrs. Clamp,” I said, and smiled at her before closing the door.

  * * *

  I could feel Dan Hamilton’s anger through the door, a stubborn steady heat like banked coals in a fireplace. I took an extra moment to settle against that anger, to force down my own in return. He’d beat Emily, he’d hurt her, the woman he was supposed to love, a betrayal of everything that was human and decent. He’d proven himself scum by so doing, no true man, and deserved to be drawn and quartered on the streets. But it would do Emily’s memory no good to scream at him. It wouldn’t bring her death any justice. It wouldn’t help me find Tamika or shut down Sibley. And who knows? Tamika could have nothing to do with Emily’s death; that part could be coincidence and a stop on the way to the hijackings. Kara still hadn’t found her, Morris had found no connections—when she was talking to me—and Cherabino was hopelessly tied up in a higher priority for the moment.