Clean: A Mindspace Investigations Novel (22 page)

I leaned my head back on the wall and tried to think. Work the problem as best I could around the headache. Finally I grabbed the phone outside the coffee closet, pulling the handset in with me and closing the door. I dialed Swartz’s number.

When the message started, I hung up. Then I called back. Still no response.

“Swartz. I…It’s a bad time. Call me back, man.” I hung up and waited. Then I checked my watch. He should call me back in less than five minutes. Then I looked again. My watch was cheap, but not cheap enough to be wrong. It was Wednesday. Wednesdays Swartz took his wife to the movies. It might be hours before he called me back.

For a long minute I stared at the phone while my headache worsened.

I had another number for Wednesdays, somebody Swartz knew. I’d met him only once, an old geezer at the Fourteenth Street meetings. I had called him just
the one time, two days before my last fall, when things were so bad I hadn’t even gone to work. God only knew what he thought of me.

The door rattled as somebody else came in the coffee closet.

Frances the file clerk was humming loudly as she pushed in. She stopped when she saw me. “You look like shit,” she said, cheerfully enough. Apparently she didn’t keep up with rumors; she wasn’t even slightly mistrustful.

“I feel worse,” I said.

“Hmm. Anything I can do?” she asked. She poured herself coffee and doctored it, scooting around me companionably in the small space.

“Your choice: shoot me now or get me an aspirin.”

She smiled. “Any particular kind?”

“Aspirin. The simple stuff. No bells and whistles.” I put the phone on the counter; I’d return it to the cradle in a minute.

I had to be pretty desperate to even think of painkillers at all, but my head was pounding in time with my pulse, and it wasn’t getting better. If I couldn’t have my drug, maybe I could at least feel a little less like dying.

“Well, you are in luck. I think I have one.” Frances plopped her purse on the countertop and started rummaging. Finally, she came up with a bubble pack, which she handed me. “Here you go, sweetie. Feel better.” Then she packed up her purse and her coffee and left the closet, toeing the door closed behind her.

I examined the purported aspirin. The foil and the bubble seemed intact, even at angles to the light; I couldn’t detect any tears or holes. The paper on the foil was clearly stamped with a manufacturer’s seal—a manufacturer that did, indeed, produce aspirin. Even
the lot number seemed reasonable. I was halfway through opening the package for the first taste-test before it hit me that this wasn’t normal behavior.

Normal be damned, I thought, as I carefully stuck my tongue on the pressed pill. The last thing I needed was to get hooked on something new. When the sharp-bitter aspirin taste came back, I spat and reached for the coffee. I swallowed the pills, both of them, without further tests. Either a personal triumph or the stupidest thing I’d done all week.

The medicine hit me as I was in the accountant’s office, in the last stage of getting a double shift approved. My headache went from excruciating to tolerable in about five minutes, and nothing else happened. I was grateful.

Late second shift, I called Kara, expecting to leave a message. She picked up.

“Aren’t you there a little late?” I asked her.

“Aren’t you?” she responded automatically. “City liaison is more than a full-time job, as I’m sure you understand. I wish you would stop calling me every few hours, though. I’ve got the higher-ups breathing down my neck, and I don’t need you doing it too.”

I was twitchy at the moment, and I had to know. “Any news on the boxes?” I couldn’t call them machines, not over an open phone line, but I had to know.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. They’re gone. But not the two you mentioned—the space scrubber, yeah, nothing but scuff marks where it used to be. The imploder’s still there, though. What’s missing are the
boxes
from Stewart’s tests ten years ago. Do you know anything about those?”

The man who introduced me to my drug? Yeah, I
knew about his tests. “It’s not boxes, plural. He had one and a couple of hospital things to monitor responses, you know, medical stuff. It was very early stage, very experimental at that point. I can tell you what I was there for, but my understanding is he kept working a long time after that, with different drugs and procedures. He could have added another box; I don’t know. Dane had been working on charting the shape of the mind in Mindspace. Last I heard, Stewart was talking about incorporating that research somehow, but I don’t know what happened with that.”

“Didn’t Stewart pioneer the work on boosting drugs?” she asked, distracted.

“What’s a boosting drug?”

“Pills they’re giving some of the midlevel telepaths to improve their numbers. They don’t seem to work for everybody, and you can’t use them for long. The Guild likes them for special ops, though.”

“You supposed to talk about that kind of stuff on a phone line?”

“Probably not.” She sighed. “The shape of the mind in Mindspace? What possible good could that do? And why the scrubber?”

“I have no idea, but I’m worried. If this gets out—”

She paused. “I know. The Guild knows too—we’ll turn over every rock, knock on every door. We’ll find who took them. We’ll get them back. Just give us a couple of days.”

“I’m still pretty sure we’re looking for the same guy,” I told her. “Don’t capture somebody and not let us know—we need our case solved too.”

“I’ll do my best,” she promised. “I’ve got an order out on Bradley. With this confirmation, the higher-ups are a lot more willing to count your vision as cause.”

“So it’s convenient for them now?”

“There’s no need to be snippy,” she returned. “I’ll get back to you tomorrow when I can.”

“It’s midnight, Cherabino,” I told her tiredly. “Double shift is over.”

She looked back, sadness crushing her like a vise, and stretched. She turned the computer off and turned back to me. “Is it really?”

“It is.” I shielded hard, having enough of my own problems without adding her sadness to the mix. “Let’s get going. Tomorrow’s your day off, right?”

“Yeah.” She grabbed her jacket, yawned.

“Paulsen said I could have the day too, if I thought it would help.” I’d also called Swartz, just in case I couldn’t make the usual Thursday-night Narcotics Anonymous meeting. Whatever was going on with Cherabino seemed to be focused on tomorrow.

“You’re still following me around, then?” She didn’t look happy about it.

“I am. I need to make sure the vision doesn’t happen. I’ll stay out of your way.” If I could.

“You do that.”

Late the next morning
, Cherabino cut the car off in the grocery store parking lot. “I’m not going to get you to go away, am I?” Her face said she was angry, but the waves of her emotions carried far more sadness and fear.

“Um, no.” I was confused. Wasn’t that what I had been saying for three days, fifty times a day? Was this a trick question?

“Fine,” she said, too sharp, and got out of the car.

Inside the store, instead of heading for the vegetables—Cherabino always went straight for the rabbit food in any grocery store—we turned left. Past the checkers, busy on a Thursday late morning, and through a long aisle of cereal. Cherabino didn’t even look at the cereal boxes and hardly noticed when I dropped back for one. When she failed to comment on the sugar content when I caught up to her, I knew something was very wrong.

We turned into the flowers section. She slowed, browsed through the hundreds of flowers, and carefully hand-selected three bouquets of white lilies—real lilies, the old-fashioned kind, pure white from being grown in a greenhouse, sheltered from all pollution. She spent almost twenty minutes—and far, far too much money—on the purchase. In the end, she
shoved two flower bunches at me. “Make yourself useful.” She kept the third, larger, bouquet in her hands.

In the car, she laid that third bouquet gently across the backseat, putting the others not too far away while she eased into the front.

She looked at the wheel for a long, long moment while the inside of an August-hot car baked my skin.

I cleared my throat. “Are you—?”

“Shut up.”

“Okay.”

She turned the key and started the car. Hot air blew from the vents, and we pulled out into traffic.

It didn’t seem right to be so quiet. But there was something boiling up on the inside of her, some strong thoughts and stronger emotions. The sadness was so strong I could
feel
it, but whatever else was there she was fighting. I got shapes, and shadows, but no definites. And past all of it, pain, mental, emotional. Just pain. I didn’t dare speak.

Twenty minutes later, the car pulled up a long, wooded hill, and Mindspace stopped. Well, not stopped, but the constant low-level presence of city minds faded and faded until we were all alone. Until there was no Mindspace at all but Cherabino and me, completely alone. It was then we rounded the corner and saw the sign: wooded oaks cemetery. And a chill ran up the back of my spine.

Her sadness intensified like a cloak falling on me as we passed through the open gate. She pulled into a tiny parking lot, turned off the car, and stared ahead.

“Shut up,” she said out of nowhere, and got out of the car.

“I didn’t—,” I protested as the car door slammed.

She opened the rear door and carefully lifted the
third bouquet. “Hand me the others,” she demanded. I handed them over. Then she said, “You’re waiting in the car.”

“It’s August,” I said, trying for matter-of-fact. “It’ll be an oven in here.”

She didn’t meet my eyes. “Fine. Just don’t follow me.”

I watched her walk up a long grassy hill, toward the first row of tombstones, the strength of her sadness diminishing with distance. Only, I thought as the temperature in the car started to ease upward, her presence didn’t get weak enough, not nearly weak enough. That bond she didn’t know about yet was getting stronger. And I wasn’t sure how to tell her, or even if I should.

At the top of the hill—still well within sight—she stopped, and knelt before a grave. I looked away, trying to give her what privacy I could. As completely dead as this space was, I’d know a mind-attack well before she’d realize it was happening. And dead was the right word—despite all tales to the contrary, cemeteries rarely had even the trace of a ghost. No one died in a cemetery; it was a place for relatives and mourners, not the shock of Mindspace memories left behind.

When her shoulders started shaking—she was crying!—I had to get all the way out of the car, torn between wanting to run toward her and wanting to run away. With neither an option, I felt pulled in too many directions, and I wanted my poison. I wanted it badly. I wanted Cherabino to stop crying, and I wanted the world to disappear in that shimmering rush and
go away
—I just
wanted
. I wanted!

I opened up the car door, sat down, and breathed, in and out, over and over. I had to call Swartz. I was
starting down the slippery slope where I couldn’t talk myself down. But where was I going to find a pay phone here in the middle of nowhere? Before I could figure it out, the radio buzzed with our car number.

With shaking hands, I picked up the receiver. “Yes?”

“Is this Cherabino?” the dispatcher asked, amid static.

“I can take a message.”

A frustrated sound and more static. “Let her know her sister called, said she’s here if she needs anything.” After a pause: “We all are.”

I took a breath and replied, “I will tell her.”

I looked to my left, through the car window at Cherabino. Her shoulders weren’t shaking anymore, but her body language still looked defeated, crumpled in on herself like an old paper doll.

More than an hour later, with the sun at its hottest point of the day, I walked up quietly, dreading seeing her with tears but not able to wait any longer. Cherabino wasn’t the kind of person who cried. The grave she was kneeling by was small, with a modest tombstone and a small central vase for flowers.

I stopped about three steps behind Cherabino’s back. “Your sister called the station, says she’s here for you. Dispatcher too.”

Cherabino didn’t turn around, running her fingers over the lilies in the central vase instead. When she had arranged the last petal to the exact place she wanted it, she pulled her hands back and pressed a small push button in the base of the vase. A bubble formed around the lilies. I recognized the gadget by the hum in Mindspace, like a deep buzzing that set my teeth on edge. It was a miniature stasis field, rare,
pricey, but it would keep the flowers in perfect freshness for months.

Cherabino arranged the other two bunches of flowers on either side, less gently, and sat back on her heels. The text on the tombstone popped out then: Peter Russell Alexander, only thirty years old when he died. The date of death was six years ago today. Why hadn’t I known about this before? I mean, we didn’t work together
all
the time, but you would have thought…Maybe I hadn’t wanted to know. Maybe she’d shied away from thinking it. She couldn’t shy away now.

“Isabella?” I said softly.

She stood up, slowly. Tear tracks ran down her cheeks, and she wouldn’t meet my eyes. She did, however, start walking to the car. I followed, grateful to get away from that Mindspace hum—and her tears.

When we got back down the hill, I opened my car door first, getting inside to try to set the trend. She followed, folding herself into the car. The door shut hard. And there we were. Her face was completely blank, disturbing shapes moving like eels under the surface of her mind. We sat there several minutes, as she gripped the steering wheel and stared ahead.

A heartbeat before I would have spoken, she exhaled in a rush.

“He was assistant DA to the city, just promoted. We’d decided to keep my maiden name on purpose, to keep anyone from connecting us, back when it was my work that was too dangerous. But it wasn’t me that day—it was him. His work. They gunned him down in a shopping mall, right in front of me—and I didn’t have my gun. He hated my gun. He’d made me leave it at home that day. Just that day. And there they were, some punk kids he’d put up on drug charges—with automatic weapons. He threw me down—me!—and
took three bullets to the chest. In one damn second, just a second and it was over. It was a shopping mall, and I didn’t have my gun. The kids were gone because I wouldn’t leave him. I wouldn’t leave him. He bled out before the paramedics arrived—he died telling me he loved me.” She looked up, her eyes empty. “We were trying to get pregnant. It took me ten months to find them. Ten months!”