Marked (24 page)

Again, a long silence.

Finally Kara spoke. “This isn't a secure line. I wasn't—”

“Give my regards to Gustolf,” I said, to make sure I understood what she was going to do.

“Oh, I will,” she said in the low, quiet voice that meant danger. “I will.” Good. Her family would get involved, and her family was a significant force to be reckoned with. With her at the helm, they might make all the difference.

I tried to figure out how to ask if I should run, get out of the country, show up in Dublin or Moscow and trade information for protection from the local Guild. Hope the chaos here kept them from coming after me. “The hearing?” I finally settled for.

Kara paused long enough that I knew she understood what I was asking. “It's still being held tomorrow morning, early. Gustolf and I will be there.”

I asked the critical question. “Will you support me?”

A long pause. Then she said, “No one is dying on my watch for asking a reasonable question. Martin Cooper wouldn't have let that happen. Besides, you've shown up for me plenty of times.”

A small sense of relief—and comfort. But Kara was playing her own game now, a game I was no longer sure had anything at all to do with her uncle.

I looked at my options—all of which involved me leaving everything I'd built for myself and all my systems of sobriety—and threw the dice in one critical direction.

Someone had to accuse Rex, right?

And I was the only one who really could. If anything, my idea would only strengthen that power. Rex, the man who'd twisted me into knots for stupid reasons, who'd threatened me over and over and over again, would face his peers over the truth.

“I'll be there,” I said. “But, Kara?”

“What?”

“No matter how this turns out, you owe Isabella Cherabino a favor. A big favor. Anything she asks.”

“Agreed.”

•   •   •

I went to find the television in the break room and turned it on to the news station. News of corruption in county politics, a murder on the subway train system, illegal Tech smuggling, the usual. I was just about to leave when the screen changed.

“In breaking news,” the news announcer said gravely. Her face, frozen with age treatments, hardly moved. “Our station has recently heard of a major flyer crash near the Chattahoochee River. Nine passengers on board, all dead including the pilot. Three homes destroyed. We bring you live coverage of the scene.”

I turned the sound off as the footage began. A long, long furrow from the edge of the river, trees scattered in every direction, raw red dirt exposed like flesh. At the end of it, the reporter stood a hundred feet away from a twisted mass of wreckage and metal slammed into a wooden house, now splintered boards. Darker splotches fell into the furrow, what might have been seats or people or plastic, impossible to tell at this distance. The silence made the wreckage cold, and unfeeling.

I turned it off. Nobody could have survived that.

The powder keg that was the Guild's political system was about to erupt, and this was the match.

But I had a job to do here at the police station.

•   •   •

Ten minutes later, I was sitting at an interview table by special permission from Bransen, ash and gall all I could taste. Outside, Cherabino read Special Agent Ruffins his rights while inside, a babysitter sat there, ready to report back to Bransen.

The door opened. A look of abject hatred came at me from across the room. The emotion in Mindspace was more of the same.

Ruffins shook his head. “I'm not going to be interviewed by a teep.”

Today, as in so many other days in this interview room, I swallowed the insult and—barely—forced a smile. “I'm all you have available today.”

Ruffins turned, but Cherabino stood in his way, very unfriendly. Behind her, some of the special tactics guys waited for an excuse. Nobody liked a dirty cop.

“Sit down,” Cherabino said.

“I want my phone call,” Ruffins said.

“You'll have it after you talk to Adam. But don't think about calling your supervisor. He's been fully briefed. You've been read your rights.”

After a long, hate-filled moment, Ruffins sat.

Cherabino went to the corner—Bellury's corner—and sat in the babysitter's chair. That was different. That—well, it threw me off. I stared at her.

Don't screw this up,
I heard in my brain over the Link.

I turned back to Ruffins. He was holding his hand over his tattoo, nervous. Below that, the soft subtle smell of . . . fear. I felt fear in Mindspace, real fear, the kind of fear a recovering arachnophobe felt when seeing a tarantula through glass. Strict control, strict thought, but underlying terror, fear much bigger than any average normal felt when faced with a telepath.

And suddenly I knew how to handle this.

“Special Agent Ruffins,” I said.

He just looked at me. Silence was his best bet, and he knew it.

“I'll make you a deal,” I said. “That meter on your arm—you can feel it when I read you, is that right?”

He looked down at the multicolored band of his tattoo. Likely so, his brain supplied.

“We can test the theory if you—”

“No!” He took a breath, and returned to silent waiting punctuated by angry fear. It wasn't illegal for me to read his surface thoughts if I told him I was a telepath, and he likely knew it.

I sat back in the chair, a slightly less threatening posture. “We can do this the easy way if you like. You tell me the truth and I won't do an active read.”

I had his attention.

“I'm sure you're wondering what that means. I'll tell you. I'll still be sitting here and I'll still monitor Mindspace around you. That means if you have a strong emotion, I'll get a whiff of it, like cologne. If you lie to me I'll spot it. But I won't get thoughts. I won't get a view of the inside of your head at all. I stay over here, and you stay over there.”

“Why would you do that?” he asked, wary, still rubbing his arm.

“I don't have a dog in this pony fight. Cherabino, over there, cares. She wins something if you're guilty, but she wins something if you're not. She has a preference for which it is. Me, on the other hand, I get the same pay either way. I only care about the truth. You give me the truth, the real truth, with no fudging or corrections or half lies, and I don't have any need to read you.”

“You'd do that?” Ruffins asked, a feeling of contempt, anger and a note of relief coming off him.

“Ask Cherabino over there if I keep my promises.”

We looked. She, reluctantly, nodded.

In Mindspace:
Not about the drug
, her mind echoed.

I never made you a single promise about Satin,
I left in her mind.
And there's a reason for that.

She shifted uncomfortably in the chair, but I was already onto Ruffins.

“Do we have a deal? The truth in exchange for keeping my mind to myself?”

“If I lie?”

“You know the answer to that,” I said, injecting as much certainty and doom into the statement as possible. His imagination would be far, far worse than anything I could say to him.

He considered it and then nodded, cautiously.

Line on a hook, I had him. The way I had primed him, any half-truth or fudging would now carry a burst of that same fear.

“Let's begin,” I said, with a smile. I asked him where he was the day of the murder, the usual softening-up question.

“I killed him,” Ruffins said quickly. “It wasn't intentional, or, well, it wasn't planned. It just . . .” He trailed off.

“Start from the beginning of the conversation with Wright and tell me what happened,” I said, in my most neutral interviewer voice. Wow, that had been easier than expected.

He nodded and sat a little taller, his voice taking on that official confidence I'd seen in him already so many times. “Noah Wright was a valuable asset into the workings of Fiske's crime organization. He'd already sold information to the man through an intermediary and was poised to meet some of the organization directly. When he lost his job, I applied subsequent financial pressure to get him to agree to infiltrate the higher-up portions of Fiske's enterprises on my behalf. I gave him information, a good mix of accurate and false approved by my superiors, and set him loose. He was doing well.” He took a breath.

“And then what?” I prompted.

“He started getting cold feet. Saying that this wasn't going anywhere. He wanted to sell some of his inventions. Or, really, with that insane Free Data mantra of his, he wanted to release them as widely as possible. He started talking about giving away that medical device he was so obsessed with. I thought I talked him down. I thought . . . ” Ruffins was looking at the back wall of the interview room, no longer at me, no longer at anything. Telling the story. “The day before, I'd checked his accounts to make sure he'd been reporting all of Fiske's payments correctly. And I found the other payments. Payments even my superiors had trouble tracing.”

No fear anymore, not any. His emotions had the even keel of someone telling a true story from recent events.

“Go on,” I said.

“Well, I went over there and confronted him about the payments. He told me it was the Chinese. He'd sold them the Galen device! Like it didn't even matter! The US military was already under contract. I pushed him, why would he do that? National security trumps freedom. We could all die in a slip. And then—”

“And then what?”

“And then he said he hadn't sent all the data yet. I lost it. The ax was just sitting there, just sitting there.” Disgust filled the air. “I swung it and I swung it until he couldn't get up. Until he'd never sell anything again. He'd never destroy anything again. And then I took out the prototype in his head.” He looked up, meeting my eyes. “I took it and all its parts to the shed in my backyard and I burned it. Once with wood and once with a blowtorch and once with lighter fluid. No one's going to use that DNA now. Not the Chinese, not anybody.”

“You burned it?” I prompted, when he was silent for a minute.

“I protected the American people. You would have done the same.” He paused. “You really haven't read me, have you?”

“No, I haven't.”

He nodded. “Respect. Respect was all I was really looking for.”

And there was the truth. He could have turned the man into the authorities, arrested him, locked him up, allowed his information to be used to benefit everyone. But instead the disrespect of his own informant turning against him had made him turn violent, ax murder violent. It had made him act to control Wright at any cost. This was not a heroic man, for all he protested otherwise. This was not a heroic act.

I tidied up the last few lingering details gently and then ended the interview.

Cherabino and I stood in the hall, totally silent, as the special tactics bruisers escorted him downstairs to the holding cells. He never struggled.

And I wondered. Had we done the right thing? He'd done wrong, very, very wrong, but so had Fiske. It didn't seem fair that his wrongdoing should buy Fiske freedom—but I didn't know what else we could have done.

And maybe that—that—was why Fiske was in charge of one of the largest criminal organizations in the Southeast. He was a puppet master, and I couldn't help feeling like I'd had my strings pulled.

But Ruffins had killed a man.

I'd caught a killer. But this was not a happy day for me, not at all.

CHAPTER 21

When the dim
hallway was empty, interview rooms lit on each side, I sighed. “You realize we've been played, right?”

Cherabino nodded. “Fiske? Yeah. We were. But Ruffins should not have done what he did. One bad apple and all that. What else could we do?”

We stood there for a moment. She was right. She was.

“Then why do I feel . . . so . . . ?”

“Unsettled?” Cherabino said. “Sometimes it's like that. We do this for the justice, and to bring resolution to the families. We're doing that here. It's the right thing to do, no matter what the consequences are.”

Then I added, “Fiske didn't have a reason to keep track of Wright, did he? Not more than usual.”

She turned to look at me. “Unless he knew he was working for the feds. Yeah, I know. I'm betting somebody put the ax there, even. Doesn't make it right. You don't go axing your informants. You just don't.”

“He did kill Wright,” I said.

“Yeah, he did.” She waited, to see if I was going to need to talk this through more.

I said nothing.

“Like I said, Adam, sometimes it's like this. Sometimes not everything gets resolved the way we want it to. We do the job anyway.”

And in that moment, I believed. I believed we'd done what we could. I believed . . . well, mostly I believed in Cherabino.

We did the job anyway.

The moment passed, and I saw the time. “Listen, I have one more stop to make before we leave. Meet you up front in half an hour?”

She frowned at me, but giving Cherabino a chance for more work was like giving me access to my poison. “Sure.”

•   •   •

I knocked on Captain Harris's door.

“Come in,” came a gruff voice.

I opened the door cautiously and closed it just as cautiously behind me. “Thank you for agreeing to see me,” I said. I was only ten minutes late.

Harris nodded and set down his pen, gesturing me forward to the desk chair. I went.

He was a gray man with gray hair and a perpetually tired look, several pounds overweight, and he had enough power and creative problem-solving to manage most of the DeKalb County Police Force and get funding from half a dozen additional sources. In addition to arbitration outside the department.

He had very little patience with me in particular, and I'd only sat down with him three times: once when I was hired, once when I was rehired after my fall off the wagon, and once when I'd had the vision that had ultimately saved Cherabino's life. He could still ruin any chance I had of employment with a single word to one of his friends. But he also used to be married to Jamie, decades ago.

“I'm not getting any younger, boy,” he prompted.

“I don't know if you knew this, but I'm one of Jamie Skelton's old students.”

“Does this have a point?”

“Do you still have your Guild pass?” I asked.

And now I had his attention. He leaned forward. “As it happens, I do. It's current. Jamie and I still talk, sometimes.”

Relief washed over me. The first part, the hard part, of my idea was done.

I started talking.

I left, half an hour later, having been chewed out to within an inch of my life for allowing Cherabino to go to Fiske's without a hell of a lot more backup than just me. For repeating the same stupid mistake in backup that had gotten Bellury killed, he said.

I walked out black and blue, chastened on every level, but I walked out with a promise.

He'd speak for me.

•   •   •

I asked Cherabino to drive me to her house. “I'd like to stay with you tonight,” I said. I kept flashing back to the vision, and to the case, and to tomorrow's sentencing. I didn't want to be alone.

She glanced around to make sure no one was watching and kissed me on the mouth, just long enough to be a real kiss. Then she led the way to her car.

Cherabino drove back to her apartment, making steady conversation to distract me. “They've set up an inquiry into the visit to Fiske's house. I have an appointment with the union lawyer; supposedly it's a split opinion on whether your vision is sufficient cause.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. It hurt, but I said it.

“I was the one who charged in there. I'll take my lumps. If it saves Jacob, it's worth doing. It's worth doing a hundred times over.” I didn't correct her. I couldn't bear to put yet more worry into the air.

Cherabino kept up a steady stream of conversation, determinedly cheerful, the entire trip, while she plotted something. Hopefully something that involved a nice dinner; she was a hell of a cook, and I'd appreciate a good meal.

Finally we pulled up to her house and got out, me pulling the bag I'd brought from the back in the hopes this might happen.

The door clicked behind her, and I felt her decision.

She jumped me. Her lips were on mine, her body forcing mine back against the wall. I kissed her back, like she was oxygen and I was suffocating. Our minds merged and her hands were everywhere.

A nagging thought pushed at me as I had my hands in her hair, on her back, on her body. A nagging thought that wouldn't let me go, even as she sucked on my collarbone in the most delightful way. . . .

She knew where this was going, and my body was right there with her, standing at attention and eager to please. But.

I grabbed her hands, gently; she pulled them away, suddenly, shutting down an automatic defense reaction only by sheer will. She stepped back, chest heaving, three buttons down the front of her blouse undone, showing the lace of her bra. Had I undone the buttons? Had she?

“Too fast?” she said, uncertain. “I can slow down.”

I struggled to breathe, to think. Only a promise, only a promise and knowledge of unavoidable consequences kept me those two feet apart; I wanted to close the distance with everything I had in me. “Do you have tea?” I asked. “Hot tea, maybe?”

“Um, sure,” she said, straightening her hair. “You want tea, I'll make tea.” She was confused, a little taken aback, a little offended. But the Link was on full-bore, and she couldn't help feeling the conflict, the “stop” within me. “Hold on, I'll make you the damn tea.”

When she brought two steaming coffee cups out of the kitchen, I was settled on her too-small couch. I'd finally gotten myself under control, though the memory of the last time we'd been here was still strong; she jumped me then too, and I'd turned her down then too, for reasons that had seemed good at the time.

I bricked up my mind, little by little. I reminded myself of my promise. Of the very real risk to her life if I was killed tomorrow. And then I took the tea from her. It was warm, and the warmth seeped into my hands.

She sat down on the far end of the coffee table, not far, but not very close either. “What's going on, Adam? I thought this was what you wanted. Considering.”

I took a breath, and met her eyes. “You made me promise that this Link between us would fade. You've made me repeat that over and over and over again until we both hear it all too often. Sex is the opposite of that.”

Now she was wary. “What are you talking about?”

I found a coaster and set the hot cup down on the far side of the table from her, untouched. “Sex with telepaths doesn't work like sex with normals, Cherabino. It's . . . it's a bigger deal. It's a much bigger deal.” I struggled to say out loud what I'd grown up with. To explain why that promise changed everything. “If two telepaths are very careful, they can have a one-night stand. But only one, and only between total strangers.”

She frowned. “What does—?”

“Let me explain this!” my voice cracked out like a whip.

Her face fell.

“I'm sorry,” I said, and I was. As much as every apology hurt, as much as I hated every one, this time I said it. This time I was sorry. “It's not that I don't want to. Trust me, Cherabino, I want to. But we're not strangers. And worse, we're Linked.”

Now she looked away, but I could feel slow understanding seeping in.

“You made me promise you—I promised you, Cherabino—that the Link would be temporary. I promised. And I meant it. If we have sex tonight, that promise will be broken. The Link becomes permanent. And tonight, tonight that could kill you.”

She backed away, toward her gun in the other room, slow, slow. “What do you mean kill me? How dangerous are you, exactly?”

“In the wrong context, I'm a loaded bomb. If they kill me tomorrow . . .” I took a breath. Regrouped. “In the right context, I'm a puppy dog. You can ask Kara. It's not—”

“Why in
hell
are you always talking about Kara!”

I stood up, defensive. “Why in
hell
do you keep pushing me? I'm only a man, Cherabino. Eventually I will tell you yes and you won't be able to deal with the consequences.”

She took a breath, and another. I felt her, slowly, clumsily, feeling for the Link. She wanted to read me. She wanted to know what I was really thinking.

I opened every door I had and let her walk right in. She could see whatever she wanted.

She went two steps in, poked around, and then ran.

She turned, sat on the bench near the door, heart beating far, far too fast.

She'd seen my feelings for her.

“Should I leave?” I asked, damning the pride, the anger, all the rest. I was doing the right thing, damn it. Why did the right thing always end up with me caught up in thorns, bleeding for the thing I couldn't have? “Do you want me to leave?” I repeated. The buses would have stopped for the night by the time I got to the stop, but a taxicab should come out this far. I had money. I could leave.

It would hurt like a second-degree burn on my soul, but I could leave.

“I thought you wanted sex,” she said very quietly.

“I wanted to sleep. Like we did before. Just that. Just—”

“Could you really kill me?” she asked.

“Maybe. Yes. But I wouldn't. Not on purpose. But if we have a deep Link . . . if they kill me, if they do worse than kill me . . . you'll get the backlash. You could die too. You'll get the pain too. They could torture me, maybe. It's a risk. And I won't, I
won't
risk—”

Then she turned away. “I think you should go now.”

I took a step toward her. Reached out to touch her shoulder. “This doesn't mean—”

“Stop it.” She pulled away.

“I—”

“Stop it. If you say one more word, we are through.”

Anger and relief and rejection mixed like oil and water inside my soul. I swallowed them down and added shields until I could breathe. “I'll get my coat, then.”

As I waited outside in the cold night, I wondered if Swartz hadn't been right the first time. Maybe I didn't deserve a relationship, not yet. I looked back at the house, at all I'd said no to, and wondered. If I could say no to that, maybe I didn't deserve anything at all.

Maybe tomorrow was just as well.

•   •   •

“Little Five Points,” I told the cabbie, by impulse.

“Where, buddy?” he pushed. He was a rough-looking impatient guy who'd have been perfectly at home in the London cabdrivers' world of a hundred years ago. He even had the grayish hat, worn from years of use.

I squelched the impulse to drop the information in his head, instead giving directions out loud. Then I sat back and sat on my conscience. I needed that boy's screams out of my head. I needed Cherabino's rejection out of my head.

The section I wanted was nowhere near Joey's territory. It was in a more upscale club area, surprisingly well lit, with a steady stream of foot traffic, most on the way to clubs or on their way back from them. Heavy brick buildings dominated the area, but there were wide sidewalks, cheerful art on every corner, and playhouses and salons and every other kind of business. Drugs were a large part of the minds around here, especially those headed down to the end of the street. In another mood, that would have bothered me. Now it just meant I was in the right place.

The cabbie let me out on a corner with a brick building lit up with flashing lights. I tipped him just enough for him to forget me and looked up the dark street.

The guy from the meeting had had very specific information about where to get Satin, and it started about a block from here, at the back of a closed antiques store.

All I had to do was knock and tell them the password—hero—and they'd let me in.

Maybe it was an old password, not good anymore, the decent part of me put in, hoping.

The rest of me—the dark, angry, fatalistic me—knew the password was much too current.

•   •   •

It was a matter of fifteen minutes to get what I needed, or as much as the cash on me would buy. Two doses and a medically wrapped needle that should be safe. A beginning, at least.

I should have shot up in the alleyway behind the place, or the one next door, with the rats climbing over the Dumpster behind the burger joint. I should have locked myself in a bathroom somewhere in one of the clubs and ignored the sticky floor and done it there. But instead I got another taxi and headed home.

That was my first mistake.

Paying attention to the cabdriver, who was talking about his kid, was my second mistake. Despite all odds, the kid went to the same school that Swartz taught at. He was off his usual route. He had just dropped somebody off. But he kept going on about the school, and the teachers who'd actually woken up his kid and got him liking school.

The kid was a troublemaker, apparently, walking with the wrong crowd. Until this one coach intervened. Sent him home with a note. And then started teaching him baseball.

“He still can't hit worth a damn. But he goes to practice most every day and takes care of the balls. He's learning how to pitch, he says. He's home at a decent hour, and when I go to school to pick him up, he'll introduce me to his friends. It's the damnedest thing.”