Payoff (9 page)

Two point three seconds later, a man came barreling out of another interview room, literally foaming at the mouth. He was carrying an industrial-weight hole punch, held like an unwieldy club in his hands. He tripped, fell directly into where I would have been standing, and hit his head. Hard. On the hole punch and then the floor with a sickening
crack
. His head started to bleed.

And on the back of it, I saw the round metallic gleam of an implant. The skin around it red and swollen, small black stitches pulling the inflamed tissue so that it ran long lines of pus.

Suddenly the man started seizing, limbs jerking hard in every direction. I stared at him, helpless from two feet away. You weren’t supposed to touch someone seizing. Quarantine. We’d need quarantine. He suddenly went still, far, far too still.

“EMT!” I screamed and—damn it—tried to find his pulse. “EMT now!” I couldn’t feel a mental signature, even with touch, but with my telepathy that didn’t mean anything. He wasn’t dead yet, I told myself.

I turned him over, frantically rehearsing my CPR training as part of the department job. Was it five breaths? Was it six? Two compressions or three? The hell with it; I angled his head up and gave him that first breath. I’d do the best I could until the EMTs—

I fell back on my butt on the hard concrete floor as Clark pushed me aside. Clark, who hated me and was doing his best to get the other cops to hate me too.

“How can I help?” I asked him.

“Go . . . Away . . . ,” he said in between compressions. “You’ve already done enough.”

I stared at him. Even with his distrust of telepaths, he couldn’t think I’d caused this. “This wasn’t my fault. That’s an illegal Tech implant. There’s any number of viruses his brain could have caught—”

“Get the fuck away from me,” Clark spat, and suddenly the narrow corridor was full of rushing feet. Full of EMTs.

I stood back, in that corner, until I was sure they had it under control. Then I went upstairs and brushed my teeth three times, with antimicrobial toothpaste. There hadn’t been time to get the damn mouth shield, and who knows what that guy was carrying? You had to be stone-cold stupid to get an implant these days, and a black-market one was even worse. If you didn’t get a wetware virus from the Tech itself, you were signing up for whatever bug the three guys before you had had.

I brushed my teeth again, and gargled with heavy-salted vinegar. It tasted nasty—really, really nasty—but it cut infection rates in half.

I spat.

* * *

“Please, come in,” Lieuten
ant Paulsen said without looking up from her desk. “Close the door.”

I pulled the door closed, suddenly wary, and took a seat in her battered guest chair. The seat squeaked as I sat down. A feeling of oppression filled the room, but I couldn’t tell if it was Mindspace or my own panicky mind. With the increased stress of the morning, I was starting to see floating lines of light go in and out of my vision. I took a deep breath and tried to calm, to slow my heart rate. Whatever was going on with Paulsen, I’d need to be at my best to handle it, not struggling to keep my attention.

Paulsen pushed some papers into a folder and set it aside. Pulled another folder toward her. Then she looked up. I expected her to speak, but she only cleared her throat. For the first time ever, I could see every year of her sixty-mumble age written on her face, wrinkles cutting deep, her warm brown skin ashen.

“Are you okay?” I said.

“I’m fine,” she said firmly, the phrase imbued with all the weight of decades as a cop trained to show no weakness. Then she paused again.

Paulsen was a decisive woman, a strong woman. A cop who got things done and constantly held me to her high standards. If she was pausing, this would be bad.

Had she found out my telepathy wasn’t working? It was better now, healing slowly in dribs and drabs more or less at the pace I was expecting, but I’d been keeping it a secret. Cops didn’t like secrets.

“Am I being fired?” I asked, and tried with everything in me to stay calm.

“No,” she said, then amended: “It’s possible.” She cleared her throat. “DeKalb County and the City of Decatur have decided to cut police funding again. By millions. Every department is being hit, across the board. Not just equipment budgets. Not just training this time. We’re being forced to let people go. And the damn politicians are going after what they call wasteful practices. Things like vacation time, recovery time from injuries, and most of all and especially . . .” She paused here again and met my eyes. “Especially contractors. Unlicensed contractors are at the top of the list of cuts.”

I sat back, the chair squeaking again. I was numb. Wait, this wasn’t about my secret? That almost made it worse.

“How long?” I asked. I liked this job. I needed this job.

“Not yet,” she said firmly. “Not quite yet. We have a couple of months before things go into full effect. I’d suggest—in strong terms—you go out and find yourself a license. A certification. Something on paper, in the next six weeks.”

I took a breath. “Six weeks? Wait, my Guild certification doesn’t count?” That was half a million ROCs in training, more, even if the Guild had gotten far more out of me in labor afterward. Before they kicked me out for the drug problem that had landed me on the streets, years ago.

“It’s suspended, has been for a decade according to the information you gave us.” She put her hand on the folder in front of her, what had to be my file.

“I have the training! I thought you guys liked that I was an independent. There aren’t that many people outside the Guild, much less at my level. Even they say my training’s still good. It’s not like I can’t do the job.” And with the normals hating the Guild and fearing telepaths, well, I’d thought my lack of certification (of affiliation) was a plus. Apparently not.

“I know,” she said, and sighed. “I know. But the commissioner’s under pressure to make cuts. A lot of pressure. And politically, well, it doesn’t look good for you. Don’t be an easy target.”

“This isn’t fair.” I tried to reach out, to peek into her head, but all I got was a sense of mourning, and determination. No matter how I tried to push, that was all the information I could get, and even that moved away like sand through my fingers. Paulsen was familiar, which helped, but we were right after lunch, approaching my afternoon cutoff for reliable telepathy, and my heart was beating a hundred miles an hour.

I pulled back and focused on what she was saying in the here and now, “—work in the interview room will be critical. Cherabino’s cases too. Give them a reason to keep you. Give me ammunition.”

I took a breath. “Right before Christmas. You’re telling me I could be laid off right before Christmas.” I felt like I was in free fall, like I was standing at the top of a cliff looking down at my life on the streets again. And to make it over Christmas—Christmas still made me think of my mom before she died. Did we have to add another heartbreak on top of that one?

She paused. “This is the worst-case scenario for everyone. I’m sorry.”

“I know,” I said, and stood. I clenched my hands together so she wouldn’t see them shaking. So I wouldn’t be tempted to lash out. So I wouldn’t burn whatever bridges I had left. But I wanted to. The adrenaline was coursing through my system all too hard, and I wanted to lash out.

Three years clean, and none of it mattered in that moment. I wanted my drug, I wanted to fall off the earth and run away. But I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I’d come too far, I’d built too much to give up now. No matter how much I wanted to.

So instead of being stupid, I did what any sane Narcotics Anonymous member did—I called my sponsor. And then I went outside to the smoking porch and I chain-smoked, six cigarettes in a row while outside the awning it rained, a nasty hard rain that suited my mood perfectly.

And if Mindspace got jumpy, going in and out like a badly tuned radio, I ignored it and tried to get my heart to stop leaping out of my chest.

I needed this job. They’d hired me back after I’d fallen off the wagon in front of them. And if I couldn’t handle money as a result, well, that was proof enough I was untrustworthy. Who else in their right mind was going to hire me now?

I had to keep this job. Whatever it took, whatever I had to pay—I’d pay in blood, if I had to. I couldn’t fall back down that cliff to the streets. I just didn’t have it in me, not a second time.

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

Alex
has written since early childhood, and loves great stories in any form including scifi, fantasy, and mystery. Over the years, Alex has lived in many neighborhoods of the sprawling metro Atlanta area. Decatur, the neighborhood on which the Mindspace Investigations series is centered, was Alex’s college home.

Roc Books by Alex Hughes

Clean

Payoff
(a novella)

Sharp