Clean: A Mindspace Investigations Novel (15 page)

“What?” Cherabino said, not bothering to look up.

“You aren’t going home, are you?”

“It’s seven o’clock. I can’t work late
every
night.” She zipped up the duffel and shouldered it. “I need to get to the grocery store before it closes. Don’t worry, I’ll probably be working from home again in a couple hours. You can call me if there’s a problem.” She paused. Cautiously, she asked, “Did you need a ride?”

“That would be great. Give me a second. I’ll get my bag.”

She gave me a funny look. “Okay. But just a second. I want to get to the grocer’s early enough to get actual meat and not that processed nonsense.”

“I, uh, need a few things too,” I lied, “so it works out.”

She followed along after me, waiting just on the other side of the men’s locker room door. “Paulsen know you’re leaving?” she asked.

“Would you tell her?” I called out, loud enough to reach to the other side of the empty locker room. “Please?”

She cursed softly. “What are you hiding?”

“Nothing!” I said.

She cursed at me specifically, louder, and left. I really, really hoped it was to talk to the lieutenant—not leaving, leaving.

I sped up my pace, shoveling my overnight junk into a big shopping bag, the good kind made of actual recycled plastic, and added a whole bunch of stuff I probably didn’t need. (Where did that yellow rubber duckie come from? I put it back in my locker.)

Then I sat down on the bench, trying to time it exactly. I went fuzzy, trying to get the precog to cooperate around the edges; it was working today. In exactly fifteen seconds, it felt right. I shouldered the bag and followed Cherabino, just slowly enough so I wouldn’t have to talk to Paulsen myself.

With exact timing, I caught Cherabino on her way out of the lieutenant’s office. She was frowning.

“What?” I said.

“Come on—you’re going to make me late,” she said, grabbing my arm. Even through the sleeve, the touch gave me that extra connection, and I got a flash of her strong annoyance with me. The lieutenant had offered her a bodyguard and wouldn’t tell her why.

Cherabino was a second-level black belt in American Judo. She didn’t need a bodyguard. Unless there was something they weren’t telling her. She glared at
me. There was something they weren’t telling her, wasn’t there?

An evening of boring shopping later, Cherabino was driving. The first tinge of dusk colored the air, the sun setting late in the summer. We were on the ground-level Lawrenceville Highway, colorful car dealerships on either side.

Cherabino asked me where I wanted to be dropped off, what with the bag I’d brought along and all. I suggested her place a little too quickly.

She turned, taking her eyes off the road. “What’s wrong with your place?”

I thought frantically. Just a little too late I offered, “The exterminators—”

“They were there two weeks ago. Remember, you were whining about it all over the office?” She blinked as the car behind her honked, turning back to the road. She pulled our car forward, into the intersection and through the now-green light. “So why are you lying?”

A dozen explanations filtered through my head, discarded one after another as I tapped my pen against my knee. She wasn’t going to like this. She
really
wasn’t going to like this.

“Just tell me.”

“I—”

“The longer you put it off, the worse it sounds. Though if you’re following me home like some dog, it had better be pretty—”

“Cherabino
.”

“Sorry.” She adjusted her grip on the steering wheel and coasted to a stop in front of another light. This time she didn’t look at me. “Go ahead.”

Cherabino quiet was trouble, and Cherabino apologizing—well, it didn’t happen often, and usually someone was dead. I stopped the tapping at once. “What’s wrong?”

There was a long, long silence, while the light turned green and she pulled back into the traffic again. Instead of her usual weaving, speeding, anything to get ahead, she drove sedately.

“Isabella,” I said softly, looking directly at her face.

She turned her head to look at me. Her knuckles went white on the steering wheel. “You were saying. Your latest crisis.”

“Am I not supposed to—?”

“Shut up.” She took a deep breath and changed lanes directly in front of another car. “No, talk. Talk, damn it.”

After a moment of mental tennis, I won the match with myself. Unfortunately. It had to be the truth. “I had a vision.”

Cherabino nodded, narrowly missing a fire hydrant. “Paulsen said. What was this one about?” In the back of her head, she wondered if the bodyguard was related. Her mental state was still more curious than upset, but depending on what I said, that might change fast. She was anticipating something bad.

I shifted the pen from hand to hand a few times. Then I looked back at her. “It was you, actually. After a bad attack.”

After a long moment she said, “Okay. What kind of attack?” Her cop voice was back, the competent, good-in-a-crisis voice that let nothing slip.

“A bad one.”

“What
kind
?” Her mind was so blank as to be unreadable.

I paused. “It’s not going to happen. I won’t let it.”

At the last possible instant, she screeched the car into the parking lot of the South DeKalb movie theater and cut the engine, ignoring the honks from the surrounding cars. Then she shifted to meet me eye to eye across the car. “
Tell
me.”

I stared back, narrowing my eyes. I was not going to lose. Telepaths were
trained
in winning the battle of the will—and this time, I had right on my side. She did
not
need to hear what I’d seen.

After a long moment, she gave up, collapsing all the way back in her seat, her hands out on the wheel to steady herself. “That bad.” Her stomach fluttered in reaction, her mind trying not to picture scenarios….

“It’s not going to happen,” I repeated. “It won’t. We won’t let it.”

She pushed the car into park and put her feet up onto the seat. Then she put her head in her hands, closing her eyes, thinking. Trying to think, to work the problem. “How are we going to avoid this?”

I faced her, turning all the way sideways until my seat belt dug into my hip. “Well, we’re not going into any warehouses alone, no matter what they offer us. We got a confirming vision from somebody outside the field, from somebody I respect. And other than that—I’m not leaving you. I’m not letting you out of my sight until all of this has blown over.”

Her head turned, her eyes coming open. “What does that do? You’re not SWAT. You failed half the entrance tests—and that as a consultant. If you’re worried, we’ll get you a bodyguard. We’ll get me some backup. We’ll handle it.”

I reached for calm and failed. “Handle it, bullshit! I’m not worried, damn it. I don’t need to pass some shit
test to watch your back. I’m a telepath—a class
four
defensive-trained telepath. It doesn’t matter two shits if I can run, not in a fight.” I didn’t mention that I hadn’t practiced the defensive stuff since college. I was still better than any bodyguard on the force, at least against what these killers could throw at her.

She blew out a breath and turned to face me. “It always matters. What are you going to do if they come at you with a gun?”

I looked at her for a long, long moment. Then, in desperation, I cheated to prove my point—I “leaked” a long line of angry concern into her head.
Are you really asking?
I said, just at the forefront of her thoughts, angry. I made myself very obvious.

Cherabino blinked, frowning. She nodded, her surface thoughts flowed sluggishly by. She didn’t like that I was in her head, but she’d asked for a demo, sort of. If I was volunteering to show her exactly why I was so vaulted dangerous, she wasn’t going to whine about the methods. She wasn’t that dumb.

If you want a demo, this is going to hurt.
I released the thought into her mind.

She met my gaze, impatience hitting me like the tip of a boxing glove, tap to get my attention, tap for a beginning to the match.
Just do it.
She was as ready as she was going to get, she thought.

I sighed, braced myself hard, and visualized sharp pain—pain like an iron to the skin—like an ice pick on fire—settling in on her shoulder, trailing in a long red-hot brand down her back. Then I hit her with the pain of a crushed nerve, suddenly, strongly, until her whole right arm fell down, unusable, until her teeth—

Then I stopped it. Cold.

The first tears had gathered in her eyes, and her face
was torn open, completely open with the pain. And she blinked, and she breathed; she took a whole minute to come back to being Cherabino.

“That hurt like hell,” she said finally.

“Yes.”

Her whole mind closed. “That doesn’t mean you’re a bodyguard.” With that, she put the car back in gear. She left the theater’s parking lot and pulled back into traffic, her driving even worse than usual as she took the left turn to North Druid Hills. She seemed to be thinking. Thinking far too hard. But the thoughts were too disorganized—and her too wary—for me to follow without breaking her trust. Not with her shut down.

I breathed myself, recovering slowly as we drove past endless fast-food joints and a lot of old trees. What I’d shown her was actually pretty mild. They trained us in far worse at the Guild. Repeatedly. But I was out of practice, and the major limitation with that sort of stunt was how much pain you could tolerate. There were no free rides in life. For every brand, every shooting pain I inflicted on her, I endured the same and worse.

Back at the Guild, I had had a real reputation for being a badass—a little shock like this wouldn’t have even phased me back in those days. But I’d gone through a lot since then, seen a lot, and Ability didn’t work when you were strung out on Satin—not in any way where you could control it.

The next ten minutes of the ride were spent in silence, while my white-knuckled grip on the door relaxed slowly and the sides of the road opened up into larger neighborhoods. Her driving didn’t get better, but my distraction did. I was worried. Real worried, about the vision.

“Why you?” she asked, finally. “We’ve got officers
trained
for this situation.”

“Cherabino, our perp is double trouble, with maybe another telepath for backup. You’re no lightweight, but either one could knock you out in nothing flat. Same for anybody we could pull—you don’t know how to defend what this guy’ll throw. I do. There isn’t anybody here trained for what you need. Nobody but me.”

We turned right onto a smaller street, and she looked over at me. “Helluva ego you have there.”

“Yeah, well. It’s called Ability.”

She took a few turns and pulled into the driveway of her small brick house. She turned off the car and stared at the wheel for a very long time. There were town houses to the left of her single-family, and a monstrosity of a mansion to the right, but her small green lot held on to the original brick building.

I waited. And waited. Finally I asked, “Are we going in?”

“I’d rather we didn’t.” Her body language was slumped but tense, as if she were bracing herself against some unnamed fear. The discomfort was coming off her in small waves, but with her this intentionally closed, that was all I got—even trying to read her. Another worry about the date in a few days, sadness, a man’s face.

I waited for her to explain herself, but nothing happened.

After a long moment, her hands tensed on the steering wheel. And her mind opened just enough to let me see her discomfort. She didn’t want me in her house while she was sleeping. She didn’t want me in her space at all, but we were buddies, and during the day, if I stayed in the living room, it was okay. Not great but okay. But sleeping…especially now…

I tried to figure out what the right thing to say was. “Look, Cherabino, I—”

“Shut up.” She opened the door and got out of the car. Then she got my bag out of the backseat, shoved it at me, and gestured to the door. “Don’t make me regret this.”

Cherabino’s little redbrick
house with its tiny yard and a small back patio was only maybe twice the size of my apartment—and probably cost three times or more every month in cash to keep, from location alone. It was in a no-fly zone—not even police cars cut through the airspace above this neighborhood except in real emergencies—and the sounds on the street were children and birdsongs, not shouting and aircars.

Night would fall in a couple hours; the days were long in summer, but it was getting late and no day lasted forever. I cut through the drought-resistant green grass and walked into the house. Cherabino shut the door behind me.

Without another word, she led the way into the house and to the kitchen. She pointed to the small, light-wood square kitchen table. “Sit. I’m cooking.”

I pulled out a beat-up chair and sat. My position would be more than close enough to keep her in sight. Hopefully the extra space would make her more comfortable with my being here. I didn’t know what she thought I was going to do. I don’t know that
she
did—she was just wary. Wary, for no reason I could see, except the obvious. I offered to help cook.

She shook her head hurriedly. “No. When you’re done ‘cooking,’ it isn’t food anymore.”

“If you say so.” I sat back. It was true, when I cooked, sometimes things ended up a little overdone, but that was why you bought extras. Second time a charm, right? Third was less charming, but it happened.

So I watched her move around the kitchen, opening cabinets and moving things around, chopping vegetables and boiling pasta. I watched the tension slowly dissipate off her. But mostly I just watched her, Cherabino, herself. The way she moved, the way she held herself, the shape of her body and the tilt of her head. She was very beautiful, was Cherabino. Very beautiful. And I would do anything to keep her safe. Even stick it out in the house where she didn’t want me. Even pull out rusty skills and get in a mind-fight, if I had to. Even go toe-to-toe with a serial killer or two. Maybe.

The bowl of pasta she set in front of me a few minutes later looked pretty, with little bits of brightly colored vegetables and sausage in a white sauce. When I dug in, it was warm and had taste to it too.