Payoff (8 page)

“Why not just run to the deck directly?” I asked.

“There’s a guard on the ground floor.”

I held my hands up, slowly. “I’m not hurting you. I’m not doing anything to you. I just want to understand.”

He glanced away for only a split second, but I missed it.

“You killed George for the money in his account,” I guessed. “To pay back the dealers you owed. You knew with a little effort you could look enough like him to fool the cashiers at the credit union. The blackmail money—”

“It wasn’t enough,” he spat. “They said it wasn’t freaking enough! I had to do something, I had to pay them the rest of it by tomorrow. And then I had to go away. They weren’t going to stop. They never were going to stop.” He let the gun drop and turned away.

“Your grandfather would have helped you,” I said.

“The old man only cares about himself, or what I do that he can talk about to his little cronies. I’ve asked him for money four times, and he keeps saying no. Then he calls and yells at me about my grades. No, the judge isn’t going to help me.”

Raymond grabbed the side door and rolled it open with a
bang.
“Nobody’s going to help me.”

I realized all at once he was going to jump.

“Hold on,” I said. “You can testify against the dealers.”

He turned. “What are you talking about?”

“You’ve got inside knowledge on the drug dealers,” I said, spinning out as many words as my brain could think of, as quickly as I possibly could. I couldn’t let the judge’s grandson jump. I had to say something—anything—to keep that from happening. “They’re in the middle of building a major case against them. If you testify, I bet you the DA will give you a reduced sentence for the murder charge. You’ll be in prison for a few years. Give you a chance to dry out, and you can take a correspondence course to finish up your degree. There’s even a law school that does that kind of course for prisoners. You keep your nose clean, you argue it the right way, maybe you can even sit for the bar. Worse case, you’re a high paid paralegal with your hands in cases and not nearly the hours of a big attorney. Your experience on the inside could be a plus. It could be your calling card. This is not a dead end, Raymond. Your life is not over. You have options. You have lots of options.”

He thought about that for a good long time. “I do know some stuff about them.”

“Please, Raymond,” I said. “Hand me the gun. Come back down the side of this thing with me and give yourself up. I’ll talk to the drug detective myself about you testifying. He’ll go with me to the DA. We can figure this out.”

I waited a long, long moment, while he thought, gun in hand. Finally, he held it out.

I took it, like I was taking a live rattlesnake that would bite me at any moment. “Thanks,” I said.

“I guess I should go down first?” he asked.

“That would be great,” I told him, still gently, still in tones that said I cared. “Just give me a second to yell down and let them know what’s going on, okay?”

“Okay.”

* * *

I
watched through the glass as they brought Raymond into the interview room. Judge Datini stood up from his seat all at once and ran—literally ran—to Raymond, embracing him.

Raymond, who’d been rubbing his wrists from the cuffs, tensed up, and pushed his grandfather away.

The judge let him go, a look of overwhelming relief on his face—and real tears.

Thank you,
he mouthed in my direction.

Then he sat down with the lawyer he’d hired for Raymond, and they started talking to the DA.

* * *

T
hat weekend, Cherabino took me to her grandmother’s house for a “small lunch” with her grandmother and two brothers.

“It’s not the whole family,” she told me. “You treat Nonna well,” she told me. She was nervous; I could feel the nerves across the Link clearly, but I didn’t say anything, and I tried to give her her space. She’d been pulling back lately.

“Thank you for inviting me,” I said. Why did I feel like she was already regretting it?

We pulled up to a tiny brick house in a large old neighborhood near Briarcliff. I was nervous too; I’d brought a bouquet of daisies, which Cherabino had taken me to the florist to buy, but it didn’t seem enough.

“Don’t screw this up,” Cherabino said, and pasted on a smile before ringing the doorbell.

The smell of Italian tomato sauce, thick cream, and browning meat curled around me as I walked in the door. A small overweight woman in her nineties greeted me, a frilly apron around her middle, a slight hunch to her back. I could see the resemblance as Cherabino leaned over to kiss her on the cheek.

Nonna took the flowers with a small smile and disappeared into the kitchen.

Then I met Cherabino’s brothers, burly guys who attempted to clap me on the back—and had to be warned off, reminded I was a telepath. I started a discussion about their jobs—water treatment plants and flyer engineering, respectively—and listened appropr
iately.

I helped set the old scratched table with a cloth and antique dishes, wineglasses all around. I stuck to water, which no one gave me an issue about. Then the food came out of the kitchen—minestrone and pasta with bacterial-protein meatballs and rich overstuffed soy cannolis and things I couldn’t even put names to but desperately wanted to eat.

Halfway through one of the biggest meals of my life, with everyone smiling and eating and me answering polite questions, suddenly, I got a flash from across the table.

Nonna was wondering if Cherabino and I had slept together. She knew she had with a lot of the other partners, since Peter had died. Unimaginable thing, your husband dying like that. But she was worried about Cherabino, and convinced I was unsuitable.

“I agree with you,” I told her without thinking. “But, no, we haven’t. We’re just friends.”

And then my mind caught up with what I’d said. Holy crap! I’d just read her. The telepathy had worked—had worked!—for the first time since the injury.

Relief and pure, unadulterated joy swept over me like a tide. The odds of my mind healing completely on its own had just gone way, way up. My telepathy . . . I was a telepath again! A little hard work, a little patience, and I could build back to full strength. I could be me again.

Nonna put down her napkin and stood, the chair turning over with a bang onto the floor. “You have abused my hospitality. It’s time for you to leave.”

Cherabino grabbed my arm and marched me outside.

“What . . . ?”

* * *

“Nonna s
ays you leave, you leave,” Cherabino said, in the car on the way back to my apartment.

She was shielding me stronger than she ever had, so well I couldn’t even get a glimpse behind the curtain. I was oddly proud of her, and just a little panicked—not much, as I was getting used to this and I’d read Nonna earlier. Nothing could be so awful if the telepathy was coming back.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it. Every apology was like rehab, but today I’d do it and gladly. “I really am.”

She was quiet then, very quiet, a small pensive frown marring her face. As the streets passed and her driving stayed sedate, I started to get worried. But there wasn’t anything to say, at least not anything I knew about. If she was blocking me out I had to respect that.

I had to, even if I’d just offended her grandmother.

Maybe fifteen minutes later the radio in the car sputtered, and Cherabino turned it up. The dispatcher’s voice came out over the line.

Cherabino pulled over to the side of the road, in the parking lot of a used bookstore. She picked up the radio handset. “This is Cherabino.”

“Is Adam with you by chance?” the dispatcher asked. “He’s not picking up at the apartment.”

Cherabino looked over at me. “He’s here. What do you need?”

“Arson case in East Lake. Fire Marshall wants him to take a look.”

* * *

The crime scene was a small burned out house, blackened support beams sticking up like rotten teeth from the piles of char and ash on the ground. The occasional curl of half-burned insulation lay like thin snakes, poisonous and waiting. A pile of collapsed, charred brick sat angrily in front of the house, as crime scene techs and people in fire department jackets poked at the remains of the house and muttered to one another.

The surrounding houses up and down the cramped street were solid brick on all sides; this one, if I had to hazard a guess, had been mostly wood. And that was the first clue.

The second clue was the burned tree stump in the front yard; the grass had burned in a perfect circle around it, that circle and none other. The rest of the grass in that area was untouched.

The last—and final—clue was the smell, when the wind changed. A smell like ozone and pepper and paprika, the smell of lightning and seasoned food blended into a perfect, instinctual whole.

“Fire Marshall,” Cherabino said from beside me.

I turned. He was a short man, balding, given to fat, but with the cynicism that only came from a lifetime of chasing criminals. His jacket was a size too small for him, and he grimaced in the changed wind. “Take a look, would you? No way this was a normal fire, but I can’t find an accelerant for the life of me.”

Cherabino looked at me. “It might not be the—”

“It’s okay,” I interrupted. I’d been worried about the crime scene, worried about having to fake it, or push my mind to major pain to read Mindspace in this area. But I wouldn’t have to. I’d smelled that scent before. “You have a rogue pyro, Marshall.”

“It’s arson, I know. I can feel it. But there’s no accelerant. If you could read the scene . . . they say you can tell me where the perp was standing.”

I took a breath, that distinctive smell filling my nostrils again. “No, not an arsonist. Well, not exactly. A pyro. A firestarter, you guys call it. And not Guild.”

And distantly, like a siren a few blocks away, I felt his concern leak out into Mindspace.

Finally, the exercises were paying off.

I stood in the observation room smoking, long sinuous trails of gray smoke drifting up into the ceiling. The recording technician coughed and turned the filter setting up even higher, the whirr of the motor the loudest sound in the place, the popping of ionizing energy removing the pollutants from the air. Even with the police department’s recent budget cuts, the filter was a solid, midrange-quality one, good enough to handle the smoke without blinking. With the air so bad out, we needed every advantage we could get.

With the higher setting, the tech stopped caring about the smoke, and I could focus on the pleasant little buzz of the cigarette without worrying about her discomfort.

On the other side of the one-way glass, in the interview room sitting alone, was a sweating overweight man in an old-style trucker hat and a shirt full of holes, decorated with the silhouette of a naked woman. His hat had a large fishhook clipped on the brim. A company uniform shirt, blue with white stitching, lay wadded on the table.

A knock on the door behind me made me look up.

“Put that out, would you?” the woman said with an odd pushy cheer. A plain blonde, she was hefty, tall, and focused. She must be new; we didn’t have many women in the department.

I tried to read her telepathically, and came up largely blank; since a case six weeks ago when I’d burned out my mind, I was struggling to recover, my telepathy coming back only in fits and starts. I’d seen enough old students go through the process, heck, helped them through the process, that I knew what to expect. I had rested like I was supposed to, done the exercises like I was supposed to, over and over again, and tried to be patient. I had some of the telepathy back—in the mornings, before two or three o’clock, before I was too tired and it got spotty again. Now was the hard part, when I had to keep from pushing, when I had to keep from setting myself back.

I could read a lot of people at surface level now, if the waves of their minds transmitted through Mindspace strongly enough, if they had Ability even the barest touch above the normal population. The new detective had to be as normal as they came, her mind not “speaking up” enough for me to hear, even though it was early in the day. Either that or we had poor valence, the waves of our minds syncing up badly. Either way it was disturbing, like meeting someone blindfolded with cotton balls in your ears.

I put the cigarette out, reluctantly, since she’d asked.

“Who are you again?” she asked. “I don’t think we’ve met yet. I’m Lisa Morris.”

“I’m Adam, the telepath consultant.” I was a Level Eight, or had been; incredibly strong, and trained very well by the Telepath’s Guild, who’d kicked me out years ago. But I wouldn’t tell her; normals were nervous enough around weaker telepaths. And neither she nor the rest of the department could know I’d hurt my brain. I needed this job.

She stuck out a hand, but I didn’t take it. “Sorry. Telepath rules, right?”

I nodded, tried a sheepish smile.

“I’m the new detective,” she said to cover the awkwardness. “New transfer from South DeKalb. Working under Bransen’s detective division. Primarily Robbery, though I pick up the occasional armed assault.”

“Nice to meet you. So, what’s the situation?” I clarified: “With the guy on the other side of that glass.”

“Ah. Thomas Hunter. He drives a truck for a company on Lawrenceville Highway. Seems an upstanding guy, salt of the earth, or at least as much as you’d care about. His record’s clean. But his truck was hijacked by armed robbers this morning, and his supervisor says it’s the second time.” She shrugged. “Plus he’s lying.” A good cop has an instinct for liars.

“You want to know what’s going on.”

“Sure. I want to know what’s going on. I also want to fill out the paperwork to the TCO on time and get a day off this week. Right now none of that looks likely, but they say you’re the best.”

I shifted my shoulders. “No pressure or anything.”

The technician stifled a laugh. Morris shrugged.

“Why Tech Control Organization forms?” I asked. Since the Tech Wars sixty years ago, since a madman had taken control of the semisentient computers and destroyed a good third of the world, since people had died, rotting in their houses and cars, their implants turned into computer-virus transmission platforms, since people had died in the millions in horrible ways, well, the world was afraid of Tech. Even now, with the smaller stuff—the oven timers and basic chips of the world—let out, cautiously, on a leash. Even now the stronger, more powerful stuff was forbidden, tracked, and shut down.

“The company Hunter works for manufactures capacitors, resistors, basic glucose and carbon-based circuits for use in artificial organs, and copper wire.” At my blank look, she added, “Components for electronics. Add in the biologic support systems . . .”

“And you get Tech,” I said. “Basic Tech, with the potential for more. A lot more.”

“Yeah, the scary stuff. The components themselves aren’t illegal, but . . .”

“Yeah.” I swallowed. “Like shipments of fertilizer, you watch them. And when they disappear, you react. Let me go get my files.”

* * *

A hijacking victim
wasn’t my usual shtick. Usually I got the difficult cases, suspects who wouldn’t talk and witnesses who wouldn’t talk about anything useful—anyone who’d gone through another interrogator and survived unscathed. But I was open to new challenges, and with any luck I wouldn’t need the telepathy too much.

I carried the stack of files under one arm and a couple of bad coffees in the other. Bellury was today’s babysitter, a semiretired cop who didn’t mind me in his head and cheerfully gave me advice as to the best way to legally threaten suspects. A good guy, steady, hard to rattle, hard to surprise.

I’d sent Bellury ahead to talk to the trucker a few minutes ago, to act as friendly as he could, and to offer him a sandwich and a cup of coffee. The sandwich wouldn’t ever appear; neither Bellury nor I was giving up our lunch today. But the coffee was doable, and we’d at least get him thinking the moment wasn’t as hostile as it looked.

The files were props, cases solved when my grandparents were in diapers, full of pictures of various shock levels and lightly printed notes you couldn’t quite read upside down. I probably wouldn’t need them this time around, but I’d be lying if I said they didn’t make me feel better.

I paused at the door, put down the files and coffee on the floor, and messed up my hair. Unbuttoned the top button of the shirt, set the collar crooked. In an ideal world, I’d grab a set of old-fashioned glasses too, since they’d announce like a highway board that I didn’t have the money for the corrective procedure. But I didn’t want to spend the time. We had a full interview docket today and I couldn’t afford to get too behind.

I took a breath. Thomas Hunter. Considering the hat . . .

“Tommy,” I said in bright tones as I entered the interview room. Bellury looked up, found himself a chair in the corner with an amused look.

“Tom,” the trucker said firmly. He backed up from the table, clearly preparing to move if a fight should come up.

“Sorry about that,” I said, jovially. Or at least, as jovially as I could pull off; cheerfulness wasn’t a specialty. Bellury stifled a laugh, but I don’t think the suspect noticed.

Tom was too busy moving his weight forward, watching me carefully to see what violence I’d bring on. This was a man who’d been in more than a few bar fights, I thought. The question was, how’d the hijackers take him down without at least a few bruises? I couldn’t feel any pain coming off him, just wariness and a tinge of guilt not inappropriate for his situation. He’d lost a shipment, after all. For the second time.

“Mind if I sit?”

“It’s your table.”

“You know, you’re right.” I settled into the chair like I didn’t have a care in the world. This was the clean interview room, the table in good repair, the walls spotless and empty except for a small mirror on the wall.

I fanned out the files on the table and made a show of looking for a pen. Bellury behind me had one, but, as requested, he waited a good forty seconds before offering. I wanted to look as bumbling as possible.

Finally he held out that pen.

“Thanks,” I said, and took it with an uncomfortable laugh. Might have overshot; the trucker was looking at me oddly. I hurriedly opened the file—the one without the pictures—and made a show of reading it. Just when the trucker seemed to be getting uncomfortable, I looked up. “Says here your truck was hijacked by robbers.” I added a questioning lilt to the end of the sentence, the kind of raised tone most people heard as indecisive.

“That’s right,” Tom said gruffly.

“Armed? They had guns?”

“That’s right. I already told the other guy all of this.”

I made a show of blinking in surprise and went back to pretend-reading the file. “Oh, gotcha. You were transporting electronics components.”

“Yeah? So?”

“Things that could be made into illegal Tech.” The raised lilt again, like a question.

“I suppose.”

“Well, there’s special procedures for these situations. Paperwork stuff. If you’ll work with me, we’ll get you out of here as quickly as possible.”

Up close, Tom looked less stereotypical. His shirt, while worn, was scrupulously clean. The fishhook on his cap looked usable. He was completely without a sunburn. And there was a light in his eyes, an awareness of his surroundings that made me size him up differently. There was muscle under that fat.

“How long am I going to have to be here?” His voice was firm, and while the accent was slow and Southern, the firmness wasn’t anyone’s fool.

Ah, a stress point. I shifted in the chair, body language more alert. “It’s up to you. We just need you to tell the truth about what happened.”

He winced like I’d socked him in the jaw. Interesting. I reached out in Mindspace—and suppressed a sigh. This job was a lot harder when you couldn’t read the suspect clearly. At least I was getting a little low-grade emotion, had no headache, and I only had two visual light flashes this morning, symptoms of my brain rewiring. I still wished I could read him, though. It was frustrating.

Well, we’d do this out loud, where the recorders could see us and Bellury could testify to their accuracy. It was what Tom said that mattered, anyway. Or, well, if Tommy bothered him . . .

“Tommy,” I said.

“Tom,” he corrected. “And who are you?”

Ah, lovely. I wouldn’t even have to offer a prompt this time. I leaned forward, a cheerful shark nibbling on the prey. “I’m a Level Eight telepath,” I said. “If you ask, I’m legally required to tell you. I’m also required to warn you that touching a telepath can be hazardous to your health and mental well-being.” It was true—or was when the telepathy was working—and it always made the normals nervous. The Guild—and the end of the Tech Wars—had made sure of that.

He pushed back from the table, eyes wide. “It wasn’t like that, really. You don’t have to make a—”

“Ah, but I do,” I said. When in doubt, push where they’re uncomfortable. There’s always something there. “I do, Tommy, really I do. If you hadn’t lied to the nice detective lady, well, then maybe—”

“I told her, I didn’t see anything.”

“But you were lying,” I pushed, with the ring of truth in my voice. The certainty that came with being a telepath. Bluff in this case, but . . .

We balanced on a knife’s edge for a long moment, then he broke.

“They took my driver’s license,” he burst out with in a rush. “You have to understand, they took my license. They told me they knew where I lived. They knew where my family lived. And then they . . .”

Success. “And then they what? They told you if you didn’t help them, what, Tommy?”

He leaned forward, over his hands, on the table, hands clenched around the blue uniform shirt wadded on the table. I could feel him thinking, shapes changing like a lava lamp inside his brain—but not the content. Finally he spoke. “My daughter is four. She’s a good kid. She’s smart. She deserves . . .”

My tone got quiet. Soft. “They said they’d kill her if you talked to anyone.”

He nodded.

“I know anyway,” I said. Pure bull in this case, but you were allowed to lie to suspects. Even to witnesses. I gentled my voice. “You might as well tell me what happened. Help us get these guys off the street. Keep them from coming back.”

He hesitated.

“Tell me, and work with the sketch artist. It’s the best chance you have now of keeping your daughter safe. Of keeping yourself safe.”

He hesitated again. “They said . . .”

“You’ve been at the station a long time now,” I said gently. “They might take it badly anyway. They probably will. But if you help us catch these guys, Tom. If you help us get them off the streets, they can’t hurt you—they can’t hurt your daughter. It’s your best bet out of this, I promise you. Tell me what happened.”

He swallowed, his eyes on his hands. I let him think, my body language sympathetic. I let the wheels turn.

Finally he reached out and grabbed the shirt in front of him. “You won’t tell the company?” A faint, out-of-focus thought came from him, barely strong enough for me to pick up. It must be important; it must be a strong thought for me to hear it. He’d lose his job if the truth got out. He’d helped them. . . . He’d had no choice, but he’d helped them.

“I’ll do everything in my power to keep this confidential,” I promised, my voice pitched to be trustworthy. “I’ll do everything I can. We’ll even try to send out a unit to watch your family. We’ll help you figure out how to get them out of town if you want. But you have to help us.”

I gave him a moment to process it as his forehead creased.

“Tell me what happened,” I prompted. “Tell me the truth.”

Like a levy cracking under overwhelming pressure, the words flowed out of him in a long, full rush. Behind me, Bellury was smiling.

* * *

When my precognition decided to work, my rating was 78P, which meant my predictions of the future were accurate three times out of four or better. It didn’t work often, though, and when it did it was nearly always regarding my personal safety.

So when the sense flashed danger at me on the way out of the interview room, I moved. Fast. I threw myself down, on the dirty floor, without any regard for dignity, pulling myself into the closest corner, pencil in hand ready as a weapon.