by Alex Hughes
“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 room. 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.
So it was up to me. Hamilton had to know something. I opened the door and made myself smile, made my body language friendly and open, when what I really wanted to do was beat him within an inch of his life.
Hamilton was a large man, scuzzy looking right now, dirty and unshaven. He was leaning forward in the chair, leaning against the table, and his right foot was fidgeting, moving back and forth in a twitchy motion I recognized. He was harder up for a ciga
rette than expected, hungry and angry, and his head hurt.
Oddly, this didn’t give me any sympathy for the son of a bitch.
“Mr. Hamilton,” I said. “Thank you for waiting. I assume we’ve read you your rights?” I met Bellury’s eyes across the room, and he nodded, slightly.
I had a small bag full of files with me, and I made a show of unpacking all over the table, stuff strewn everywhere, most of it far too much in Hamilton’s space for comfort.
As expected, after about the third thing he pushed it all, forcefully, away. “You can’t hold me like this. I ain’t done nothing wrong.”
“You ran from a police investigation.” That wasn’t a crime, or at least not anything major, but it looked bad, and most suspects realized that. Innocent people didn’t run—or at least, that’s what the cops believed. “You ran from us when we tried to bring you in for questioning.” I paused in the middle of my unpacking, making a show of thinking. “Oh yes, and there’s the matter of your wife’s body being found in your home. Your wife’s murdered body.” Entirely too long ago—Emily deserved justice faster than this.
“I didn’t kill her.” Hamilton sat back and glowered. Went back to fidgeting.
“You don’t seem surprised to hear she’s dead.”
“I don’t know what happened, okay? I came home late—real late—and there she was. I’d had a little too much to drink. It took me a minute to figure out what had happened.”
I took a seat. “And you ran.”
He looked tired then, suddenly very tired. “That wasn’t somebody breaking into the house. It was just luck I wasn’t there for them to kill me.”
I leaned forward. “You think they were there to kill you and murdered Emily, say, by mistake?” Even the thought made me angry. “Why the hell would you think that? You owe too much to the bookie?”
Now he was angry too; he leaned forward also, until we were far too close over the table. I didn’t back down.
Finally the tension broke and he leaned back and started fidgeting again, his eyes going to the lighter in my front shirt pocket. “You give me a cigarette and I’ll tell you all about it.”
“You tell me all about it and I’ll give you a cigarette.”
He frowned, hard, the anger rising.
I waited.
“I’ll tell you some, but you give me the cigarette now.”
“You can’t smoke it indoors.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.” I pulled out one of my blue smokes and passed it over the table. He grabbed it like it was a lifeline, just smelling the thing. I saw a shadow of myself in that moment and hated him all the more. “Who would want to kill you?” I asked, but it came out sarcastic and bitter.
“Other than Emily?” Dan said. He shook his head. “When you’ve got the kind of talent I’ve got, you make plenty of enemies.”
“Like the bookie?”
He sat up. “I paid the damn bookie off. Did he tell you I didn’t? My trade was worth fifty thousand ROCs, easy. If he says otherwise, he’s lying.”
And suddenly it all came together in my head. “You traded the blueprints—those blueprints you stole from your work—to pay your gambling debts. You realize that’s a felony Tech violation.”
“And that worm Edelman had the balls to threaten me about it. Never thought he’d actually follow through, though. And for Emily . . .” He trailed off then, like he actually felt something for her, like she was a person and a punching bag both. He played with the cigarette. “Well, it was time to get lost for a while. I assume you caught him and he told you about the prints? Well, I’ve got him red-handed on the threats. You want to make a deal, I’ll testify against him, you get a murderer for free. The prints weren’t all that great and you can’t prove I took them anyways.”
He looked up. “You want to hear about the whole shebang, you gotta let me smoke.”
* * *
I had to swallow my anger again as I took him outside, grabbing one of the beat cops with a gun to act as guard. I lit up my own smoke while he did his, to try to seem companionable. To get him to try to trust me. Emily’s sister had said he was a braggart, and I was starting to see that.
We were standing behind the main bulk of the Headquarters building, facing a bedraggled courtyard in between office buildings, a courtyard that never did seem to grow grass, despite the fact that one of the office buildings facing us had a low roof that sparkled in the sun. Sun. With all the rain lately, even with the awning above me I was soaking up as many rays as I could in self-defense. I needed to absorb more vitamin D; we all did, with that much rain going.
Hamilton smoked all the way through a cigarette before he would talk. Finally he reached for a second—and I gave it, with a question.
“Why are you so sure it’s Edelman? You guys don’t get along, I understand that, but it’s a hell of a jump from that to murder.”
He took a big, long, obsessive drag on the cigarette, then blew the smoke out of his nose like a belligerent bull. “Edelman never liked me. Was always jealous of my talent. That’s why he was always riding me, trying to get me to slip up. You know how it is. It got so bad I had to go blow off steam now and again. So maybe I spent too much with the poker and the picks. Bastard drove me to it.”
I’d met this guy—or men just like him—in rehab. I couldn’t say I was any more impressed with it in the real world. Swartz said blaming everybody else for your screwups was how you kept screwing up. “How’d you find the blueprints?”
“I’m not saying I took the blueprints,” he said, but he was thinking about them, and it was early in the morning on a day I was feeling spry. I got all the details I wanted, clear pictures of strange diagrams that had biologicals on them. Not just computers, but the semisentient computers that had nearly crashed the world. Powerful, forbidden diagrams and he’d had them for two weeks before he even thought to sell them. Having that much power, that forbidden knowledge in his hands, had just gotten him off.
“Did your bookie take a look at them? Is that why he let you off the debt?” I asked. “We’re not being recorded here.” Then I saw something in his mind—“What was that extra diagram of anyway?”
“I talked to a guy about it. It’s a wireless networking setup designed to work with—”
One sudden gunshot cracked over the courtyard. My concentration broke and I was back in my own head.
My eyes searched for where the sound had come from—there, at the top of that office building. That shiny something I’d seen earlier reflected the sun again.
Next to me, Hamilton’s mind spat pain—then grew faint.
I turned; he was on the hard concrete slab, collapsed. Blood poured from his throat in heavy spurts, arterial blood.
Crap, he was— I yanked off my long-sleeved shirt, buttons flying in my haste, wrapped it around his throat. The beat cop was already gone, on the way for help.
“EMT!” I screamed, all I could do. “EMT!” My mind echoed the call as loud as I could make it, with all the power of a Level Eight telepath pitched to be heard by even normals. I called again, “EMT! Help!” louder and louder as my hands grew sticky with Hamilton’s blood, pouring out all over my hands as I tried to hold pressure to the wound.
The scars on my arms mocked me as I crouched, helpless, while Hamilton died.
A near army of help arrived, but far too late.
CHAPTER 24
Cherabino showed up with the EMTs, her hands full of a nasty rifle.
“Where did he go?” she asked me.
I still had my hands on Hamilton’s neck, but they’d gone slack. I’d felt the void when his mind had gone . . . wherever minds went when you died. There was no pretense now, but I hadn’t moved from my crouch.
“Hey!” Cherabino said, poking at me mentally. “Where did he go?”
“Where did who go?” The answer leak
ed through before I even finished the question. “The shooter. He was on the roof across the way, but—”
She was off and running before I had a chance to think. And then—I was after her, my lungs laboring with every painful stride. I couldn’t let her go alone. I couldn’t. Not her. Not if I had to run a million billion miles.
Cherabino was across the courtyard and in the front door of the building I’d indicated within a few seconds. I got in somewhat later, just in time to see the stair door slam shut in the lobby.
With a sigh, I pushed through—only to be knocked down by her coming the other way.
“Damn illegal floaters,” Cherabino spat at me. “He’s headed to Decatur Square.”
An old lady in the lobby gaped at us as Cherabino pushed past her, hard. I made it back to my feet, lungs laboring—damn cigarettes—and tried desperately to at least keep her within sight. In the courtyard, my shoes squelched in the mud, feeling a million pounds heavy.
I could see the floater in the sky as Cherabino paused at the street, her gun pointed up. But she didn’t take the shot, and the floater got smaller. The hooded figure riding the small, less-than-three-foot anti-gravity platform, wobbled briefly in midair; but he corrected, pulling on the small cords that were all that gave him balance. Floaters were like surfboards for the sky—small, nimble, quick. But instead of surfing over water and sand, you floated over buildings and unforgiving concrete. One misstep and you died. There were reasons these things were illegal.
Cherabino holstered the gun and started running again, a steady stream of curses echoing through my mind.
She ran for over a mile, every stride hitting pavement painfully in department-mandated shoes, sweat dripping down her face, determination and cussed anger driving her on. I fell farther and farther back, finally dropping to a walk as I felt her frustration intensify. Even at a walk, I was getting suspicious glances from passersby—the blood on my hands tipping them off to something. The department would get more than a few calls about this.
I walked, panting, trying to let my heart and lungs catch on to the fact that I wasn’t dying, then pushed back to a painful run. By this time other cops had passed me in pursuit, but I still wasn’t going to leave.
