by Alex Hughes
Contents
Title Page
Title Page
Rabbit Trick
Turn the page for two bonus short stories
Bonus Flash Story: The Carousel
Bonus Short Story: Inky Black Sea
Thank you for reading
Author Bio
Rabbit Trick
Alex Hughes
A Mindspace Investigations
Short Story
With bonus short stories
“The Carousel” & “Inky Black Sea”
Copyright © 2014 by Alexandra Hughes
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the author, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” through the contact form at the web address below.
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Or, email the author directly at [email protected].
Hughes, Alex C.
Rabbit Trick: a Mindspace Investigations Short Story / Alex Hughes
ISBN: 978-0-9916429-0-8
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination, or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cherabino called me in the middle of the night, 3 a.m. to be precise.
“I thought we were day shift,” I muttered into the phone, my eyes still gummy with sleep. I was a consultant, not a cop, and therefore I didn’t get woken up in the middle of the night. That was more her job. She was the homicide detective.
“The department’s short staffed,” she said, as if it was the answer to everything. Lately, maybe it was. “This one’s a priority. Listen, I can be at your apartment in sixteen. Are you going to be ready? Let me rephrase this. Be ready.”
I sat up, kicked the switch on the wall with my foot that would turn off the telepathic shield generator around me. I blinked as the world turned inside out – and then Mindspace came back, full of sleeping dreams and quiet sighs.
“Why do you need me?” I asked.
“Priority case. The clock’s ticking. Be ready, okay?”
I rubbed at my eyes. Sighed. “Fine.”
She hung up, abrupt even for her.
“And good morning to you too,” I said, and made a face. My hand went to the hidden panel in the wall, the one that held two slowly-decomposing vials of what used to be my drug. Three years clean, and I kept them there just in case, just in case I needed them. My body wrenched as I said goodbye again. Today I didn’t have time to fall off the wagon. Today we had a priority, whatever that meant at 3 a.m.
Then I took a quick and freezing shower, threw on clothes, and was waiting under the busted streetlight two minutes before the agreed upon time. I lit a cigarette, realized I hadn’t shaved. Oh, well, at 3 a.m. probably no one would care.
“You owe me coffee,” I told Cherabino grumpily, as I slid into her battered old cop car.
She handed me a ceramic lidded cup and nodded, taking in my unshaved face before deciding not to comment on it. I was dressed, after all.
Detective Isabella Cherabino was a pretty woman, tall, with dark hair, large breasts, and a black belt in something Asian and deadly. She had the highest close rate in the department, which made her a big favorite with her bosses. My help got her a big portion of those closes, so that made me a favorite with her. Well, on the days I could pull the rabbit out of the hat. On the ones I couldn’t, she was insufferably grumpy until she closed the case on her own. She was a good woman, despite her flaws, someone I admired, for all her brashness. Someone I wanted to spend time with. And not just because she and this job were part of the system that kept me on the wagon, kept me fighting for the best me. Because she was Cherabino.
I hoped today was going to be a rabbit day, but half-asleep I didn’t make any promises. I put on a safety belt as she pulled the car out of Park and engaged the anti-gravity generator.
I swallowed, hard, and grabbed for the handle on the door. Great. We were going to fly. My knuckles went white with the force of my grip.
Cherabino drove with her usual verve, making several highly-illegal vertical lane changes without even the benefit of a siren. I’d learned by now to stay quiet, or she’d feel like she had to make a point. I’d prefer not to throw up tonight, thank you very much. Especially not before I had to see the body. Let it not be too far gone, I prayed to the Higher Power. Also, let us not die from her driving.
In Mindspace, I felt small waves rolling off of Cherabino, focus, worry, anger, all mixed in with the odd crystal clarity of a homicide detective’s work mode. Lately I tried to keep my mind to myself – she didn’t like me snooping – but thinking this loudly, she wasn’t making it easy.
“It’s a cop,” she said, words firing into the empty space of the car like bullets. She fidgeted and made another near-miss of a floating bus.
I swallowed, tried to focus on her words and not how close we’d come to dying. “Who’d he kill?”
“She,” Cherabino said. “And somebody killed her, tonight. Was sitting in her backseat, waiting for her. Strangled her to death on her way home from judo.” Her mind roiled with anger, with disturbance.
Cherabino took jujitsu or something like that. She was out late, alone, a lot. She was a woman, and a cop. Like it or not, this had to be feeling real personal.
“Did you know her?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “She’s North DeKalb, not out of headquarters.” I could feel the effort as she pulled it together again, the measured pace of her thoughts returning with bitter force. “But she’s blue. She’s one of us. We bring hell to stop this guy – fast. Who knows who else he’ll kill if we don’t. He clearly doesn’t have a fear of cops.”
“If this is North DeKalb, why call us?”
“First priority,” she returned. “You’re the only telepath we’ve got. They want you to do your juju on the crime scene, get us a name. A description. Something. No way in hell this guy walks away. Supposedly I’m your handler. When the commissioner wakes me up, I move. I don’t care. Nobody kills a cop and gets away with it. Especially when we don’t have a reason.”
I felt her heart, beating too fast, a presence in the whole car. “Are you okay?” I asked.
“Fine.”
“You’re not…”
She made a face. “Ask me again when we catch this guy.” She didn’t like this situation. She didn’t like it at all.
“Do you want me to—?”
“Shut up,” she said. “You’re going to pull a rabbit out of your damn hat, we’re going to catch this guy, and then you can ask me whatever crappy thing you’ve got on your chest, okay?”
We dropped two stories as she started the grounding procedure too fast. A shriek escaped my lips. I’ll admit it wasn’t a manly sound, but with my life flashing before my eyes that didn’t seem important.
Somehow we grounded without dying, with only a small bump, in a very dark neighborhood. As she turned the wheel and peeled us into an ancient parking garage, a blocky winding screw, level after level of concrete curled down into the ground and up into the sky. We circled up a level along the stained concrete ramp, and pulled into a circle of bright, bright lights. Row after row of police lights, flood lights, penli
ghts, and one single, cheap car.
In the distance, a dog barked furiously.
Cherabino said hello to the detective in charge of the scene while I hung back. Detective Bull was a tall man, pale, who stood with a coiled lean power I associated with basketball. He frowned when he saw me, and checked his watch. He was angry, and nervous, and very aware of his surroundings. Cherabino and him got caught up in some kind of hail-fellow-well-met conversation, and I lost interest.
“Hello,” a deep voice said from behind me.
I turned. A grizzled fifty-something uniformed cop stood there, his meaty hands tucked around his equipment belt, the right hand all too close to the gun. He was only a few inches taller than me, maybe six-one, and bulky, mixed muscle and fat. His nose had been broken multiple times. Now, he emanated strong mixed emotions, anger and worry and sorrow and guilt in a tangled, shifting knot that I found stressful to even look at.
“Hello,” I responded, holding onto calm only through training and will. I upped my shields and paid more attention to the guy – a lot more attention.
“You the teep?” the cop asked gruffly.
“Telepathic expert,” I corrected. “Yes, I’m him.” I waited for him to pull away. Since the Tech Wars, normals feared telepaths, for good or ill. I didn’t wear a patch but that didn’t mean I couldn’t get a face-full of that same fear.
But instead of moving away, he looked me up and down as if judging me. “What color are my boxers?”
I sighed, lowered the shields a bit, and skimmed the information off the surface of his troubled mind. Damn parlor tricks. “You wear briefs,” I said. “And that was a visual I could have done without, thanks bunches.” I shored up my shields, annoyed now, trying to push his nasty emotion-snarl out of my head. The fear was there all right, with anger too.
Cherabino was finishing up her conversation with the detective, maybe fifty feet away from me in front of one of the lights; she was gesturing less and looking more thoughtful, spine a little straighter. It wouldn’t be long now.
So, cut to the chase. “What are you doing here?” I asked the cop.
His mouth flattened in a long line and he glanced back over at the car, currently surrounded by techs. Anger and guilt forced their way past the shields into my head. “I’m Audrey’s partner.”
“Your name?” I asked.
“Wiggles,” he said. Stared as if he dared me to make something of it.
I swallowed a snicker. Wiggles, really?
“The station captain is a friend of mine,” Wiggles said in a flat tone. “We went to academy together. I told him he should call you in.”
I took a breath. Ah, the reason he was here. “I’ll do everything I can,” I said, very quietly.
He nodded, as if that ended the conversation. Maybe it did.
Across the parking deck in front of the lights, Bull said something to Cherabino, and left the area.
I walked closer to the crime scene, step by step. The car was a cheap domestic white box without even an antigrav generator – strictly ground-level only, cheapest of the cheap. Cops weren’t paid that well, and personal vehicles weren’t covered as an additional expense, but this seemed a bit cheap even so. The car was scrupulously clean, however, from what I could see in the blinding floodlights pointed at it, with fully inflated tires and no dings.
Forensics personnel swarmed in and around the car. Their thoughts were quiet, ordered, and surface level, more than a little sleepy, and despite myself, I suppressed a yawn as I got closer. Another step, and I paused. A low-level disorder – something not right – made the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Someone had died here, violently and recently. I told myself not to be a ninny, that this was what I had come to see. I still shielded, hard.
Cherabino came up behind me. “Need them to move?” she asked about the techs.
I took a breath, asked myself the same question. “No, not tonight. Give me just a minute.” If they’d been half as upset as Wiggles… but they weren’t. It should be fine.
She fidgeted, but didn’t push the issue. She let me use her as a ground when I had to drop deep into Mindspace, looking for clues. I wasn’t quite ready for that, yet. I wanted to see what I could see.
A technician blocked my view of the driver’s side as he took photos. Flashes of light interrupted the night until he moved away.
The driver’s side window was dotted with blood, thrown onto the glass from the inside. Smears in the blood, in the window, even a crack in the safety glass, maybe from her elbow. She’d fought back.
“What was her name?” I asked.
“Audrey Peeler. Officer Peeler,” Cherabino’s voice said from behind me. “Hey!” she yelled. “You done with the photos already? We need the telepath to scout it.”
The photographer bitched but finally moved. Then I was close enough to see it. Her. Audrey. For the first time.
Tightly-braided hair crowned her head, freckled face thrown back, hands askew. Face twisted in shock, wrenched in anger, the whites of the eyes red with blood, dark spots around them. And a long, dark red, thick line bisecting her neck, spilling dried blood down onto her shirt in irregular splotches. A thin cord in the middle of it, as transparent as fishing line, draped over the backside of the driver’s seat. A key ring, a can of pepper spray lay on the floorboards, just barely out of reach. A strap thingie on the seatbelt on the passenger’s side, an adjuster of some kind, I noticed. Not currently in use.
I sniffed. Strong smell of urine, of drying blood, stomach acid, violence and death. No pepper spray.
Cherabino pushed me aside, not hard, and knelt to get a better look at the woman’s hands.
“Her fingers are cut to hell. Maybe got them under the cord before…” She straightened, adjusted her gloves. “Well, it wasn’t enough.”
Blood droplets covered the entire driver’s side window and part of the back window besides, lighter – a lot lighter – in the back. She must have struggled hard to send this much of her blood flying around. But a portion of the back left seat was clear of blood. And the front passenger seat was oddly clear as well, all except for that adjuster. I didn’t know much about blood splatter, but the back seat had to be where the killer was when he was strangling her. The front seat…?
“Can we get on with this?” Cherabino asked. “People are waiting.”
I realized the tech working on the back seat was leaving, and no one else was coming toward the car. Huh. Cherabino’s yelling must have done the trick, even if I didn’t strictly need them to desert the scene this time.
I slowly thinned my shields, easing into Mindspace. Cherabino held out a mental “hand” impatiently.
I held on, keeping my hands and mind to myself, and solidified my link back to the real world.
Then I dropped into Mindspace, the real world greying out as I went deeper, and deeper, my connection with Cherabino trailing out behind me like a bright yellow cord, yellow where no yellow could be. Mindspace was cloudy tonight, wrenched by wild and strong emotions, panic and blood. I rode out the panic, the suffocating panic, pain, and despair, letting them wash over me like water from a duck’s back, and took a closer look.
Like a black hole, a small spot in front of me was quietly swallowing space around it, slowly, slowly. If I wasn’t careful I could Fall In. Find myself trapped in whatever place minds went when they died, and die myself.
Above me, Cherabino murmured a question, the sounds flowing quietly like a stream.
“Six hours,” I guessed, hoping the question was what I thought it was. “The M.E. can tell you that, probably. And yes, it was a violent death, here. She was killed here, and the killer…” I went looking for his signature, for his feelings left over in Mindspace like thin ghosts. “Her panic is strong. She didn’t know her killer. And he… it’s definitely a he. He’s very quiet. Very calm, with a sharp… a sharp something to him. I’m not sure I would know him again if you put him in front of me. Her panic is just too strong.”
&n
bsp; I moved around that center black hole, slowly, taking care not to disturb what I was looking at. I wanted a better look at the killer, I think.
But there, on the other side of the woman’s panicked emotion-ghosts, on the other side of her death, were the emotions of another mind, someone else who’d been here, in the car. A small, terrified person whose panic had mixed in with the cop’s so that I hadn’t seen him at first.
I squelched my strong, emotional reaction as too dangerous, too destructive in Mindspace. When I was calm, I surfaced.
I opened my eyes and saw the real world.
“There was a kid,” I told Cherabino. “A kid. Maybe four, five, six years old, and he ran away, fast. He might still be here.”
Shock, concern, disbelief radiated off her in waves, but I was already rushing around the car, dodging techs and cops, following the boy’s frightened mind-trace like a bloodhound.
The sound of squealing tires echoed behind me, along with yelling from the cops as some pedestrian tried to get in the garage. The dog still barked, somewhere out there. And one scared little boy, hours ago, had run as fast as his small feet could have taken him, falling twice, the pain and frustration of each fall blooming like terrified flowers in the fabric of Mindspace.
I ran, half blind to the real world, distantly noting that I would look like a fool to the cops and not entirely sure I cared right now.
Because the killer had been this way, too, or someone had, someone calm, sharp, and annoyed. And I had to find the boy before he did.
Away from the lights, the parking garage was a dark cavern of concrete, painted lines, and forgotten cars full of shadows and emotion-ghosts. With me skimming along the surface of Mindspace, I could see assignations, drug deals, moments of worry over lost cars layered upon layered in deep, textured dark. Months of memories. Months. Far more than usual. Mindspace here was deep, and eager to learn.
