Payoff (4 page)

Standing in front of the now-closed door was a white, overweight guy in an Atlanta Braves baseball cap, with the small three-dot tattoo on his right hand that would tell paramedics he had an artificial heart. He was sweating, droplets of it on his neck, and the butt of a gun showed faintly through his shirt on his waistband.

“The club is closed,” the guy said, his face screwing up in what should have looked ridiculous but instead looked fierce, like the glare of a bulldog before he bit down and didn’t let go.

Normally at this point Cherabino would have flashed the badge, but oddly, here, she didn’t. “When’s it going to open?” she asked instead, her voice pitched higher, like a silly college girl. She played with her hair in a way that made her suddenly less threatening. I did a double take. She could almost pull that off.

But I could take a cue. “Yeah, I majorly need a break,” I said, and pulled her toward me suddenly.

She threatened me with violence over the Link if my hands got too friendly, but giggled. “We need someplace to go,” she said, and put her hand on my face, shyly.

The guy with the gun relaxed his body language. “We’ll be open at six,” he said.

“We’ll see if we make it that long,” I said, smiling down at her lecherously.

The threats in Cherabino’s head escalated into a kidney blow, but she smiled, playing along for his benefit. She giggled again. “Let’s get out of here, okay?”

And we wandered out, hand in hand, flirting—me enjoying it immensely while the back of my neck itched like someone was going to shoot me at any moment. But we made it back to the car and she pulled away.

“What was that all about?” I asked.

She shot me a glare. “Drugs. A lot of them, and guns, and ammunition. They’re running a major operation out of the place—and, better, we have a guy inside already.”

* * *

She dr
ove us through the skylanes to a small divey barbeque joint maybe ten miles away, and got a table. We ordered tea and waited. And waited. I got more and more tired, and finally asked the waitress for a cup of coffee, which made me feel jittery but got me to focus.

Finally, forty minutes later, Johnny Kubrick walked in the door. He sat down at the table, took off his filthy knitted cap, and scratched his scalp. The tracks on his arms flexed with the movement, and his painfully-thin face grimaced. Cherabino offered him wipes she’d gotten from the waitress earlier. He nodded to me, and took them.

“Hey, sweetcakes,” he said to Cherabino.

She blushed, and didn’t object to the title, which was odd.

“You working the Plantation?” I asked him. We’d worked together for a year or two, taking down the guys who’d once sold me my drug.

“That’s right.”

“I was starting to think you missed the signal,” Cherabino said, with a little smile.

“Naw, just needed a second to extricate smoothly. Good to see you again.” He winked at her.

Huh? There was some history here I wasn’t aware of, I could feel it. It took everything in me not to sneak out over the Link and take the information from her, but I’d promised. And my promises meant something. Or at least they did, now.

Kubrick meanwhile had washed off the apparent caked-in grime from his hands, the apparent track marks on his arms, and was working on the black-eye makeup on his face. He had a pile of wetwipes on the table already, their formerly-pristine surfaces now covered in multiple colors of dark pigment. His face, once he finished swiping at it, ended up a little streaky, like a rock musician after a crazy-sweating concert, but it was obvious, once the makeup was off, that he was just lanky, thin, naturally. The sickness, the addict’s heaviness and history ground in, well, they’d all been painted on, and had come off that easily. He still smelled, but I was betting that was the clothes he was wearing; he’d always smelled like a rose when he wasn’t undercover.

“Thank you,” Kubrick said to the waitress, as she dropped off a cup of coffee for him. She did a double-take and smiled uncertainly before taking our orders. As I remember, she was dating one of the beat cops from the area, and could be trusted to keep her mouth shut—or at least Kubrick had some kind of reason to believe that, or he wouldn’t have taken off the disguise where she could see him.

So. Time to order. I got a soyburger with real pulled pork, real bacon and pickles, with Brunswick stew and home fries. Cherabino got a loaded baked potato with fried okra on the side and a large unsweet tea. And Kubrick got a salad. A big salad with every conceivable vegetable, and he ordered it like it was the finest ambrosia available. Maybe to him, it was. It certainly cost enough.

“Funny seeing you here,” he told us. “You’re a little out of your territory. I assume Homicide has a pending case?”

She nodded, her face a little softer. She was very comfortable with Kubrick—very, very comfortable; she wasn’t putting up the walls she usually did with the other cops. “We’re looking into the death of a college kid. It’s got connections to the system in Decatur,” she said. “The kid’s roommate says he’s involved in the drug scene, and that it was out there in the Plantation. Looks like a point-blank gunshot, a la drug execution. Doesn’t look good for your guys.”

Kubrick frowned. “What does the student look like?”

Cherabino gave a description.

He nodded. “I’ve seen him. I’m surprised you even got a glimpse. This group is careful. They lock their doors obsessively, they clean up after themselves. You wouldn’t believe the hoops I had to jump through just to buy the first dose of drugs. They normally require a student ID, if you can believe it. Did you use the telepathy?” he asked me, in a tone of idle curiosity.

I shrugged. He’d liked my “extras,” as he called them, back when we’d worked together bringing down dealers, but it had been awhile, and I wasn’t—under any circumstances—going to mention the sprained mind to him. Most normals feared telepaths, back in the back of their heads, whether they admitted it or not. I wasn’t going to give him or anyone else a reason to think I was weak.

“Tell me about the dead kid,” I said.

Kubrick sat up, rubbed his nose, thought about it. “He’s been coming to the Plantation as a party-goer for awhile. Rumor has it they’ve put him on a rub-a-dub.”

“Rub-a-dub?” Cherabino asked.

He sighed. “Give the kid some overpriced drugs on credit, get him good and hooked with a real big bill, then tell him the only way to work it off is to start dealing. You do it with somebody you don’t think is going to be easily suspected, somebody who’s hooked but not desperate, somebody good with street smarts who has contacts you think you can turn into money. Rumor has it he was supposed to be selling on the campus, but nobody there seems to know about him.”

“So he can’t be selling much,” I said.

“Or he’s doing it so quiet none of the guys are hearing about it. Campus PD is great at finding the drugs. They have dogs sometimes, they have people inside, and every year they pay a student to buy before they sting. That’s why the traffic’s out of the club, back there. It’s easier. Campus doesn’t have jurisdiction. That’s why they called the county narcotics unit, though; won’t be long—if you didn’t spook them too bad—before we have them red-handed.”

“How much was Raymond buying?” I asked, out of curiosity. With his class load and that internship, and him still with his head above water, I couldn’t see him having a heavy habit, not yet. Things tended to fall apart in those situations, ask me how I knew. Of course his drug was— “What was he buying?” With the right kind of synthetics, you could be boosted right through the courses.

“That’s the thing,” Kubrick said. “He was buying old-fashioned straight snow cocaine. The pricey stuff. And to get him on the line they were probably charging twice what it was worth. Even at twice a week, he was blowing through money like nuts.”

“Where did he get that kind of money?” Cherabino asked.

“Stealing,” I offered, quietly. “Cons. Stickups. Or some kind of skill you can barter for cash from the right kind of people. It’s there, if you’re willing to go low enough.” All sorts of things were there if you were willing to go low enough.

Our food arrived. We dug in, but my fancy burger with all the fattening stuff didn’t have much taste. Raymond was from a good family, a rich background. And it sounded like he’d been on the first rung of that ladder I’d ridden down to hell and back—the first stages of the world falling apart.

“So,” Cherabino said quietly. “Any reason to think someone ordered Raymond killed? Maybe one of the guys from that room?”

Kubrick paused, fork on the way to his mouth. “That’s the thing. Nobody’s in a turf war right now, nobody’s actively pursuing the college except this group. And Raymond wasn’t making any waves that I could see. They had him right where they wanted him. No reason to wish him dead—much less to do it. If you’re asking me—”

“We are,” I said.

“If you’re asking me, whoever killed him wasn’t involved in this drug group. Maybe it’s on the selling end. I can try to find out who exactly he was selling to. But my gut says whatever the issue was wasn’t drugs.”

“You sure?”

“It’s just a gut. Nothing like your stuff. But my gut is usually right about this kind of thing.”

“Even so. Catch us up with the players in this group,” Cherabino told Kubrick, and added, “please.”

And I got a sudden, intense flash of interest from her, and then him and her in the middle of sex, and I knew he had a tattoo on his hip. I shut down the Link as much as I could, strong, from my end, and shuddered. Old memory, faded with time, but—

This was Cherabino. I pushed away my burger, as Cherabino and Kubrick talked shop, comfortable enough with each other to smile, to joke, to flirt.

I talked just enough not to draw attention, my stomach curling in jealous anger. And I left, reminding myself that hating someone for having what you couldn’t wasn’t a good idea.

I’d have a lot to talk about to my sponsor tomorrow.

* * *

Cherab
ino had other cases, so she had me call in to see if Bellury could come pick me up while she went to talk to victims’ families in cases she didn’t want me there for. I told myself it wasn’t personal and she just wanted space. But part of me wondered jealously if she was just wanting to spend more time with Kubrick.

The phone rang, and I got transferred.

“Hello?” Bellury answered.

“It’s me. Listen, is there any way you can drive out to—”

“You just got a telephone call from a judge,” Bellury said. “Judge Datini. He wants you and Cherabino in his office right away. Is this something I need to be there for?” His tone was a mixture of support and suspicion. “I can bring the drug testing history if that’s the issue. We’ve got years of it. We can do another one today.”

I could feel my cheeks heating. “No, that’s not what this is about.” Though really, at its core, maybe it was. I needed to pay off the debt I had to the judge—now. “What did he say exactly?” I asked.

* * *

Judge
Datini answered the door stooped over, looking very frail. “I have twenty minutes before court starts. Come in.”

He led us back to his office again and settled down behind his desk, rummaging through drawers. The window shades were drawn and it was darker today than usual. The little bonsai bush on his desk gave off a faint glow, the light changing slowly over several minutes to a different color, and then another. Had to be a very expensive genetic splice—something with a deep-water fish, maybe.

Cherabino waited to speak until the judge was seated, until he had fished out a brand-new unlabeled file and settled back in the chair. “You wanted to see us, Judge.” She was thinking she didn’t have time for this. Her boss was already up in arms about the time she was spending on this case.

“Have you made any progress on the case with my grandson?” the judge asked me, specifically. He held my eyes.

I nodded as seriously and competently as I could, and did my best impression of Cherabino’s competency. “We’ve got several promising leads we’re pursuing.”

“None promising enough to tell me about.” A heaviness settled over the judge. The mammoth desk and rows of ancient leather-bound books in bookshelves filled nearly the entire space, so that he looked small in comparison. Small in a way he hadn’t before. “And why is that?”

“I . . . it’s only been a day,” I said.

“These things take time,” Cherabino said, cautiously. “Give us a chance to do our jobs.”

“It’s not you that I asked to find my grandson,” he said.

“Even so. Was there a reason you asked us to come in?” she asked.

The judge visibly shook himself, like walling off a part of his reaction he wasn’t ready to look at. “I received a letter from Raymond this afternoon. He’d put it through the system without an office number. Anything without an office number gets routed around for at least a week before they can find who it belongs to. He knows this.”

He pierced me with a look.

I owed this guy. I owed him a lot—and since Raymond had been found dead, my only option was to pay him off with the truth about what happened. For all of Cherabino’s suspicions, I couldn’t see him doing the deed—why would he request our services if he’d known what happened already?

“What is in the letter?” I asked him.

He pushed a file forward. When Cherabino was just about to take it, he put his hand over hers and took a breath. “These are, well, it is to say that they are pictures, explicit pictures of a young woman—a very young woman—and an older man engaging in, shall we say, acts of a sexual nature. I received them an hour ago. I have no idea why he would send me something like this. Well, you can read the letter for yourself. He says he needed me to keep them, and needed me to help him figure out what to do.” He lifted his hand, and let her have the file.

Frowning, Cherabino visibly braced herself, and opened the file. I looked over her shoulder, and saw what had been described, various sex acts between a young girl and an older man. Unfortunately, they weren’t the worst thing I’d seen in this job, since there was no apparent injury involved, but the pictures were disturbing enough in their own right. She was so very young. . . .