Mind Games (41 page)

I hold my breath. “Who?”

“Helmut. You ought to tell Helmut you’re not a nurse. He’d be proud of you either way. It would make no difference to him. He has such a generous heart.”

“I want to come clean,” I whisper. “So badly.” I leave him laid out on the couch and cross the room to get my clothes. I latch up my pink bra and tie my shirt around me.

“You can tell him.”

“It would cause too much harm.” I pull on my pink underpants and black jeans.

“That’s crazy.”

I look across the room at him, try to be cold and clinical. He’s a target, and I should’ve zinged him. Now I have to start over again. I go over and sit by him, place my hands on his chest. “I’m so sorry,” I whisper, “so sorry.” I try to connect, but my mind is a muddle. I still can’t do it. I shut my eyes tight against the tears. Everything is lost now. There’s no way out.

“Hey, hey,” Otto sits up and pulls me to him.

I’m trying not to cry. “Otto—” I swallow hard, lips on his shoulder. “All I ever wanted was to be normal. It’s the only thing I was trying to do.”

“I know. I understand.”

“I wanted to be free from fear. I want it for everybody. I do.”

“We both want that. That’s one of the reasons I feel the way I do about you.” He strokes my hair. “We’re together now. We’re not alone anymore, and that changes everything. At least, for me it does.” He pulls away, looks at me straight. I regard him blankly, catch a flash of embarrassment before he recovers and smiles. “Anyway, I have a surprise for you.” He reassembles his outfit, buttoning and buckling.

I’m too shaky to handle another surprise, and maybe he sees that on my face. “A good surprise,” he adds. He strolls over to his desk and picks up a golden envelope. “Would I be remiss in assuming you own a formal dress?”

“What?”

He comes around to the front of his desk. “I want you to accompany me to the Mandler-Foley Spinal Resources charity ball tonight.”

I gape at him, feeling like I’m in one of those dreams where random parts of your life merge together. Here is Otto inviting me to a ball that bears the name of Shady Ben Foley and his victims, the Mandlers. “What …?” I begin feebly.

He seems amused. “It’s only a first annual, but it’s shaping up to be the social event of the season, and it supports a good cause. Most importantly, this fellow Ben Foley is something of a law-enforcement success story. It’s critical that I, as head of Midcity law enforcement, put in an appearance.”

I stand up. I don’t get it.

“I know this is late notice. I usually escort Sophia to
these official functions, but due to our falling out … Anyway, if I’d known you back then, I would’ve asked you. What do you think?”

My stoked fear mixes with my confusion, making me quite light-headed. “A law-enforcement
success story?”

“Indeed. Ben Foley is one of our most dazzling law-enforcement triumphs. He’s a con artist we’ve arrested numerous times, but we could never quite make the charges stick. It seems we finally got through to him, because he’s turned his life around. Mr. Foley realized crime doesn’t pay, so to speak, and has become an asset to the community. A reform story that’s all too rare. A truly enlightened society, of course, makes reform its goal. I might like to speak on that at the ball if I get a chance.”

Otto’s explanation does not help my bewilderment.
“You
reformed him?”

“Not personally. It seems to have been a combination of steady police work, arrests, warnings, and lectures from my officers. We do occasionally get through to some of them.”

It strikes me as both outrageous and wonderfully hopeful that Otto thinks Foley might have been affected by lectures from police officers. I don’t know if I should laugh or cry. Here I am, paralyzed, unable to save myself, my friends. And Otto invites me to a ball for Foley. Nothing makes sense anymore.

He sits back down on the couch. I stand above him and I look down into his eyes, and I realize one thing: Otto makes sense. I felt goodness in him. I felt his desire to make things right, and that desire is my desire. I had a good feeling about him even as a face on the door. I know his heart. It’s a shock to think that.

“What do you say?”

Shelby and Packard said Otto would punish us all. But I was in him; I know him. My gut says to tell Otto
the truth. To trust, to believe. There’s a third option where nobody has to die, and the road there runs through trusting Otto. He wants what I want.

I take a breath. “That’s not why he turned good, Otto.”

Otto tilts his head.

“Ben Foley isn’t a law-enforcement success story. He was disillusioned.”

“By his life of crime.”

“No, he was disillusioned by disillusionists.” I pause. There’s no way back now. “He was professionally disillusioned. For money.”

Otto laughs. “Justine, the disillusionists don’t really exist. That’s a myth.”

I soak up the warm glow of his adoration, knowing it may be the last time.

“No, they’re real. I’m telling you, the Mandlers paid to have Foley disillusioned. They took out a hit on him—not on his life, but on his psychological status. Basically, Foley was broken down, psychologically, by professionals who do that work for money. Who very much exist.”

Otto crosses his legs. “It’s simply not logical that anybody would have that kind of control over another’s well-being. There’s certainly no highcap power like that.”

“A disillusionist has a different kind of power from a highcap. A disillusionist draws power from being emotionally messed up.”

I kneel in front of him and look up to find his handsome features softened. It has to be okay for him to hate me. I never had him anyway.

“Otto, disillusionists are screwed-up neurotics who channel their overload of crazy emotional energy into others. It’s a kind of physics. A kind of energy physics. In a sense, disillusionists crash and reboot people.”

He looks at me sideways. Smile gone.

“Foley was disillusioned, and the Mandlers would probably confirm it,” I continue, “if you asked them in confidence. They felt terrible afterwards.”

Otto narrows his eyes. “I have to say, I was taken aback by how readily they embraced the man who destroyed their son.”

“It was pity that made them do it. You’d be surprised, Otto, how healing it can be for the victims to see their victimizers broken. To see their humanity.”

He’s silent for some time. I can see his mind working. My insides tighten as Otto settles a pained gaze on me. “It seems I should’ve investigated you after all.”

There’s this moment here when all I can think is,
What am I doing?
But what I’m doing is trusting and believing and going forward.

Otto peers down at me, repeats my words: “‘Channel their overload of crazy emotional energy.’ Justine, back at my club, I asked you how you’d overcome your health fears, and you said they never go away, that you just move them around. I often returned to that, wondering,
how does she do that?”

I bite my lip. I wasn’t ready for him to put it together so fast. I’d wanted to tell it at my own pace. I need to stop him. “Well, see, Otto—”

“You channel it into people.” His olive skin’s gone ashen. “Jesus, the vein star. The fake nurse. You channeled it into me. My God—”

“It’s not as if—”

He’s got my wrists. “You were attacking me all along?”

“No—”

He stands, pulling me up with him, eyes blank with horror. “You made me feel all of that …” He tightens his grip. “You filled me with fear, and with such overwhelming joy, too. And our connection—” He lets me go with a look of revulsion.

I stumble backward. “That wasn’t part of it, I swear.”

“Just a gratuitous twist of the knife?” He sees me as a monster now.

“No, Otto—”

He doesn’t hear. “Well played, well played. Incredible—” He’s looking back and forth, little eye movements that show a brain at work. And then he laughs the angry kind of laugh that hurts to hear when you care about the person. “Only one man on this planet could recognize the exquisite damage you could do to me. Only one man would come up with an organization dedicated to performing
psychological hits
, of all things …” He’s trembling. “Even now, Justine, even now—Jesus …” He stares out the window. “Uncle Helmut, too. I’m not ashamed of all that despair. And then you came and filled me with unbelievable joy and passion. And terror, of course. I thought I was losing my mind, and I didn’t care.” He faces me now, eyes shining, lids angular with pain. “Brava. Are you with him?”

“What?”

“Of course you are. I can practically smell Sterling Packard on you now.”

“No, hold on. I’m not with him like
that.”

“So it is Packard.” He shakes his head. “The way you made me feel … and then you attacked me!” He walks around to the other side of his desk and extracts handcuffs from a drawer. “I am going to round up Helmut and everybody in your organization and I am going to seal you all up so far and wide …”

“You can’t.”

His gaze is cold now. “When it comes to maintaining law and order, there’s very little I can’t or won’t do. You can’t begin to imagine how I hate to be kept in the dark.”

My pulse races; my stoked fear is spiraling dangerously high. Frantically I look at the door. Locked. Like
I’d escape anyway. Out the window, the blue and yellow Midcity flag flaps angrily on a flagpole.

Otto comes across the room to me, calm exterior. We’re both masters at that. My mind races over my friends and Packard, and I cross my arms. “You’ll kill us like you killed Diesel.” I wait. “You remember Diesel?”

He stops in front of me. “I didn’t kill Diesel. He’s sealed up.”

“His skeleton is sealed up. He died alone and helpless in a boarded-up gas station out in the middle of nowhere. Because of you. That qualifies as you killing him.”

Otto seems to have a hard time comprehending this. “Diesel’s dead?”

“I saw his bones myself. You’re a one-man legal system and executioner.”

“I never meant for Diesel …”

“To die? Well, you killed him all the same. You’re a killer, same as the Brick Slinger.”

“I had a neighbor set up to help Diesel. I had an account paid up for his food—”

“And the man who ended up with the gouged-out eyes? You rendered him helpless by locking him up.” Otto doesn’t deny it. I continue. “They died because you’ve got too many people imprisoned. And if you lose control and let them all escape at once, and that bloodbath really happens? Then a lot of civilians will die. What I told you here today saved you and countless civilians.”

He fingers the cuffs; he seems so angry I’m not sure if he’s going to follow my thinking. What have I done?

“Otto, what if all these highcaps you have stashed all over the place, what if there was a way to reform them?”

Silence.

“What if they were disillusioned, and they came out the other side like Foley? Reformed?”

He shakes his head. “No.”

“Packard has something you need—a method of reform that works on humans and highcaps alike. You have a prison overpopulation problem. You need us. If we disillusioned your ultraviolent highcaps, most of them could be freed. It would relieve all the pressure on you.”

“We know how deeply you care about that.”

“You need Packard to lead the disillusionists and get the highcaps back under control, and for that Packard needs to be free.”

“Do you have any idea what Packard’s capable of?”

“Has he ever killed anybody? Even out of neglect?”

The look on Otto’s face hurts my heart.

“Don’t you think he’s served his time? You said he’s not one of the violent ones.”

“You don’t know what happened.”

“Maybe that’s why I see things clearly. I’m responding to reality here, and you know what I’m seeing? I’m seeing you making your history with Packard more important than your motto. To protect the citizenry—”

“Don’t you dare use my motto on me!”

“The citizenry is kept safer by your enlisting Packard to reform the highcaps instead of struggling to keep them sealed up. You’ve reached capacity. This is your best option. I know you see it. And he’d control the highcaps. Nobody deserves to live in fear.”

I hold my breath, hating the way he looks at me now; his brown eyes shine with hurt. “You attacked me even as we made love for the first time.” His disdain feels like a knife.

“I didn’t know. I thought you were a murdering crime boss. We believed you’d gouged that man’s eyes out with your thumbs, Otto. We had these horrible photos …”
I stop here. It’s just as twisted that I’d sleep with a man who’d do that.

He stares at his still-untied shoes.

I say, “Packard would do anything to be free.”

“I’m sure he would.” He looks up at me coldly; we regard each other silently across what feels like an endless tundra. Then he asks, “Are you going to come with me voluntarily, or do I need to use these?”

“Where are we going?”

He shakes his head. “Answer the question.”

“We both know you don’t need those.”

He drops the handcuffs in his jacket pocket and leads the way out of his office and down the hall, walking just a little too fast, like part of him wants to lose me and the other part wants to make things hard on me. In the elevator he watches the lit buttons count down from eighteen, and I watch his face; my faith in my leap of faith descends with every floor.

He grips my upper arm hard, too hard, as he marches me straight through the bright lobby and out to his limo down the block.

He said he felt overwhelming joy. So had I. I feel sick for what I’ve lost.

Jimmy starts to get out, but Otto signals for him to stay in the driver’s seat. He opens the back door for me himself.

I get in and slide over to make a place for him and look up, waiting, hoping. But he just stands there. The dark look he gives me sends chills through me. And then he slams the door.

He walks around and gets in the front seat next to Jimmy. And I start wondering here if I’m riding with Chief Sanchez or Henji.

          Thirty-five