Vacant (3 page)

She'd never said she was above the rules, her mind leaked into mine. She was overcome with shame that Branen, the supervisor who'd believed in her and been there for her during her husband's funeral and after, would think she'd beaten a guy to death. That anyone would believe that of her . . .

I don't believe it,
I said quietly, with the flavor of my mind so she'd know it was me.

Shock and horror. Then: “Stay out of my head,” she spat out loud, and her mind became a wall against me.

They left me on the main floor of the police department, Branen telling me to go home.

“She really didn't do anything wrong. And I was there too. Why aren't I being accused of anything?”

Branen stared me down. “Ward, you have to understand. I have three witnesses saying she was involved, and none for you. You got lucky. Right now the less I see you, the better; you understand?” He was worried about possible murder charges, about the family suing the department. He would do everything in his power to keep those two things from happening, but he had only so much control.

The police brutality charges—those he believed. Isabella had always had a temper, and he absolutely believed she'd done this thing.

Shocked, I stayed behind as they walked into the department. Crap.

Tuesday morning and
I was, two days early, in the old coffee shop to meet Swartz. He was there at our regular (rescheduled) meeting for the first time since his heart attack months ago, and when I walked in and saw him—five minutes before the appointed time—it was like a small miracle, a return to what was and had always been.

Swartz had been my Narcotics Anonymous sponsor for years now, and was a good guy and a good friend. He'd also been an early riser for the entirety of the time I'd known him, and seeing him here now was like a return to normalcy. The last of the puffiness in his face from the procedures had finally left, and his color was coming back.

A few months ago he'd had a heart attack, a bad one, that had damaged the vessels around his heart bad enough to keep him from being eligible for an artificial heart. He'd come very close to dying. How close still bothered me. I'd made a deal with the Telepaths' Guild for one of their medics to heal the damage. I'd spent all the money I'd had, and owed a great deal more besides, but it had been worth it. Swartz had been worth it. Even if I was terrified he'd never fully recover, and that I'd be in debt to the Guild for the rest of my life.

Here now, he was looking good. He'd gotten a pot of
licorice coffee for me and a pot of herbal tea for him, which already sat on the worn wooden table, ready to go.

I said hello to the bartender and folded into the leather booth, pulling off my scarf and gloves. I was smiling, really smiling, for the first time in a long time.

“You look good,” I said. It was true, and it had the pleasant additional effect of distracting me from the events of earlier.

“I'm doing better than they expected. Should be back to teaching by summer.”

“Just in time for summer school,” I said. “And all the really difficult kids.” I set my scarf down in the booth and took one of the ugly coffee cups off the tray, pouring a cup of that licorice coffee I associated so strongly with our meetings.

“The kids just need a little attention.”

“I'm sure,” I said.

The vision from earlier still haunted me. I'd seen it over and over, and now we were talking about some of his kids. Worse, Cherabino was in the middle of a political train wreck, and I couldn't help. I couldn't help. Even so, something about being around Swartz made the world make more sense. Just sitting next to him made it less overwhelming.

I poured the coffee, the strong smell of licorice normal and comforting in context. Today, for once, I had my three things picked out and ready to go, not that it made me feel better about the vision. “I know what I'm grateful for this week.”

“Already?” His amusement leaked into Mindspace very clearly.

“One, Cherabino took me to visit her grandmother again, and this time she didn't hate me.” Unlike the last time.

“That turned out well, then,” Swartz said, with a nod. “Good.”

I wished everything with Cherabino went that well, that easily. I wished the conversation yesterday had gone better. I didn't know what to do. Often, I didn't know what to do at all, like now, with Branen so . . . something.

But this morning, this moment, was supposed to be about gratefulness. I nodded in acknowledgment. “The second thing I'm grateful for. Having control over my own money again, even if it's going out faster than it's coming in while I'm on part-time hours.” I sighed. “I'm getting nervous.” And with the department not wanting me there right now, it was only going to get worse. I was worried about Cherabino too.

Swartz held his cup of herbal tea loosely, not sipping, like it was more for the warmth than anything else. “Stay humble. Work the problem. You have a PI license now,” he observed.

“I guess I could try to freelance some with that,” I said cautiously. “I wouldn't know how to start, and anyway, you said the structure of a real job was good for me.”

“Sometimes a man needs to make his own way. Seems like this is a chance for you to prove you can,” Swartz said. “It's good for a man to test his mettle.”

“I may not have a choice. I need to do something,” I said cautiously. “My savings is okay for another month or two—maybe three if I'm careful and they give me more hours—but it won't last forever. I've been working for the police department for years. I don't know how to do anything else. And if my hours are down . . .”

“Didn't you work for the social work office for a while?”

“Cherabino got me the job after I helped her with the case, after I got out of that rehab she recommended me to.
I can't say I loved the job, but I did okay there until she came looking for me again.”

“You've known Cherabino a long time,” Swartz said.

I nodded, then sipped the licorice coffee again. “We're still together.” It still seemed surreal that we were dating. I kept expecting her to end it. She had a long-standing fear of people getting too close, and while I understood it—her husband had died in her arms at a particularly bad time—I kept expecting it to come bite me in the butt.

“Don't borrow trouble. Enjoy what you have now.”

“Yeah.” For a man who couldn't read minds, Swartz had a nasty habit of reading mine. He knew me too well.

“What's wrong, kid?”

I found it hilarious these days that Swartz called me kid. I'd turned forty recently. I suppose to Swartz I was a kid, though. He'd been born old, and oddly, that was comforting.

“Isabella . . . well, she's getting blamed for a murder she had nothing to do with. And since we—” I stopped. Took a breath. “Remember how I told you we dropped in on Fiske's house after I had that vision a few months ago? Well, it was kinda worse than I told you.”

“Worse?”

“Well. Um, we shouldn't have done it, but Cherabino thought he was threatening Jacob or something and she didn't stop to ask questions. So she rides in like a cowboy with nonlethal guns blazing, and I follow her in, because as dumb as this is I'm not going to leave her to get injured. I knocked out, like, six, eight people with telepathy and one of them ends up hitting her head. I . . . I might have killed her, maybe. Maybe just a concussion. Either way, by the time we get to Fiske and Cherabino threatens him, I know it's going very bad. I mean, Fiske is the organized crime
boss of half the Southeast, and there we are in his living room. Cherabino's on the task force. She knows how bad this guy is—there's a literal file six inches thick of crimes she's sure he's masterminded. Violent stuff.”

Swartz glanced around the room carefully, then back to me. “Should you be talking about this kind of case information in a public place?”

“Probably not,” I said, and sighed.

“You appear to be alive. Why did he let you go?”

“I don't know. That's the thing. We pissed him off, royally. He did manage to set up a situation that invalidated most of her evidence against him, but there's still the task force. Which Cherabino isn't on anymore. She was supposed to have a hearing to discuss the stupidity of it all, but now . . . well, they're grouping those actions with the murder we found. I get why we're suspects, or at least she is. I mean we found the body, but you'd think we'd get a little professional courtesy and, you know, them not assuming she did this thing. But they're making it seem like it's a pattern, and it's getting political. It happened on the wrong day apparently. I'm worried.”

Swartz looked at me and blinked.

I laughed. Had I really found a situation that Swartz didn't have a wise answer for immediately? Just my luck.

After a few minutes, I said, “I'm worried about her.” I wanted Swartz to tell me what to do.

Swartz replied with a thoughtful “You think that this Fiske man is influencing the murder charge?”

“No,” I said immediately. “No, that's stupid. He's not like that.”

“So, what are you saying?”

I'd answered quickly, but now I was starting to wonder. Cherabino thought he had a few judges in his pocket here in Atlanta. . . . “I don't know what I'm saying. She has half a
dozen enemies anyway, but nobody knew we were going to be at that concert. The odds of this being a deliberate thing . . .” I trailed off. “The brass is smart. They'll give her a slap on the wrist and then go find the real killer. They have to, right?” I had to believe that, regardless of the political stuff. The department stood by their officers. They always had, right?

After a short pause, Swartz said, “The truth has a funny way of coming out, even if you don't want it to.”

“Yeah.” My brain flashed fuzzily through the interrogation last night and the vision. That vision. I forced myself back. “It feels like I need to do something, but I don't know what to do. It's Cherabino.”

“If she needs you, she'll ask for help,” Swartz said calmly.

“This is Cherabino,” I said. “You've met her, right? She'd say she was fine lit on fire and covered in supercancer. And then she'd work a fourteen-hour shift and close two cases and then complain nothing got done. It's not me here. I swear.”

Swartz thought about that for a moment. “Pushing your way into the situation isn't going to help anything if she doesn't want you there.”

“It would make me feel better.”

He took a sip of his tea. “Even so. What's the third thing?”

“The third thing I'm grateful for? You know, I don't remember.”

“I'll wait.”

I sipped at the coffee and thought. And thought. “I wish I didn't have the visions,” I said finally, unable to think about anything else.

“That's not something you're grateful for.”

“I know.”

Swartz waited, patiently, and after ten minutes of silence he pulled out the NA Big Book, the collection of readings we did for Narcotics Anonymous.

February was Higher Power month, where we came to believe in a higher power and being restored to sanity. This time, the sanity seemed a bigger miracle than the God stuff. The powerlessness I felt, could feel all over again. The surrender—and the sanity—were harder.

*   *   *

I caught a bus back to the DeKalb County Police Department, which took forever. Worse, the mood of the bus passengers was particularly grim today. Traffic was heavy, and I felt the sadness, despair, and frustration of a dozen strangers like they were my own. They worked all day and still couldn't pay the bills. They despaired. I despaired too, actually, some reflected emotion and some a lack of sleep and a lack of knowing what to do about Cherabino.

The ancient stone steps of the department felt almost restful in comparison, despite the officers bustling to and fro inside. Their minds moved in preset patterns like an insect colony in progress, a dance seen a hundred times before. Booking had some particularly loud suspects screaming at each other while the arresting officer tried to keep them apart, but otherwise everything was normal.

Cherabino was on the ground floor, unexpectedly, deep circles under her eyes. She spoke with one of the secretaries, the one who handled human resource forms.

How are you?
I asked her quietly as I approached. She didn't look good.

She flinched and looked up in my direction. “Adam.”

The secretary, an older woman with a twin sweater-set, looked between us with full attention, just ready to collect the latest gossip. Since I'd been sitting in the pool here, they thought they knew everything about me, but were always looking for more information. The straightforwardness of that motivation was surprisingly calming, at least on the days when I wasn't feeling self-conscious.

“What's going on?” I asked Cherabino, ignoring the audience.

I saw her close down, her face taking on the blank cop look. “I can't talk,” she said in that tone that brooked no argument. Her mind was also pulled in, closed, with a sense of urgency.

I waited, concerned.

“I'm sorry, but I really can't talk right now,” she said. She thought that it would be a few hours before she got enough sorted out that she could come find me. Her head hurt, the beginnings of a migraine.

I realized she had deliberately opened up enough for me to read her so that I'd accept her answer. That was a big moment of trust for her.

“Sure,” I said, much to the disappointment of the secretary, who was trying to figure out what extreme thing had happened between us. I turned and went back to my almost-desk. But I watched Cherabino, in Mindspace, for the next ten minutes, until she went back up the elevator and I made myself let her mind go.

I sat at my borrowed desk in the secretaries' pool for another fifteen minutes or more, staring at the phone, trying to decide whether I could handle going home on my own right now or whether I needed to call Swartz. I wanted my drug. Nearly four years clean, and I wanted my drug desperately in that moment.

I felt Cherabino's headache moving across the Link into my head, and I was exhausted. And lonely. And worried. Talking to Swartz might be a good idea before I did something stupid.

The phone on the desk rang.

“Yes?” I answered.

“This is your watcher, Edgar Stone,” came a man's voice on the other end of the line. Great. Stone worked for the Guild, and while he wasn't a bad guy, among other things it
was now his job to make sure I paid back my debt on time. That made me not like him.

I sat back in the chair and rubbed my eyes. Looked like the secretaries would get some gossip this morning after all. “Your timing is terrible.”

“I've called you three times. Don't you check your messages?”

“I've been busy.”

“Listen, I'm sorry to tell you, but the Council has changed their mind about the terms of your debt.”

I blinked ahead. “What? I don't think they can do that.”

“You haven't been working your hours consistently. I warned you that could be an issue.”