Clean: A Mindspace Investigations Novel (31 page)

She laughed out loud. Hard. “That self-obsessed, are we?” Then she laughed some more, calming slowly. She shrugged. “Get out of your head for the next few hours. We’ve got an officer missing. I’ve already got people covering every angle I can think of. It’s your job to cover the ones I can’t. Pull strings at the Guild, read minds, do hocus-pocus crap in the conference room for all I care. But
find her
. Get her back in one piece. Preferably, before any of us have a chance to finish the to-do’s I just handed out.”

I shifted uncomfortably, feeling like I had to say something. “I—”

“Question?”

“Well, no…”

“Then get to work. The SWAT team leaves in less than an hour, and we need to be ready.”

I talked to Andrew
, went over my notes and the files, called Kara. I even called Sanchez, the detective from the scene behind the hardware store—the warehouse was on the south end of his territory.

After that, I was out of things to do.

So, I locked myself in the coffee closet, turned off all the lights, made sure there was a sign posted outside to keep people away. I sat in the darkness and took a breath. I was going to try to find Cherabino the creepy way. I was going to do what I’d promised her in the beginning I’d never do—use our interactions, our connection, against her. The exact opposite of “keep your hands and mind to yourself.”

Our link—that slow-growing link I’d been worrying about for weeks—was a blessing now. I could find her mind no matter where she was. I didn’t know if she would trust me enough, now, to let me rummage around in her mind, to get the physical location. But I had to try.

I thought of Cherabino. Beautiful Cherabino, strong, angry, quiet, sad Cherabino. The woman who’d brought greenhouse-grown lilies to her husband’s grave. The one who’d taught me that being beaten up wasn’t the end, and how to fight back. The woman
who’d dragged me kicking and screaming into a healthy life, again and again, with no regard for the consequences to herself. The woman who’d called me a failure and meant it. Cherabino in the living room with the silky robe, her hair loose and beautiful, her body…I moved that one aside. Cherabino.

And I found her.
Her
. Still half drugged. Her mind was fuzzy, slow, and her cheek hurt. Her ribs hurt. And the duct tape around her wrists was pulling at the tiny hairs on her arm, which ached. But the pain was good; the pain was slowly bringing her back into herself.

The whole world smelled sickeningly sweet; if she hadn’t been so fuzzy, she would have thrown up. She’d been trying to put a name to the smell, for an interminable time, trying to put a name to it. She thought…chloroform.

She’d been drugged with chloroform, and she couldn’t quite open her eyes.

Where are you?
I asked.

Where am I? she echoed, fuzzily, fuzzily.

The hard surface under her check had little bits of something on it—gravel? I suggested—maybe gravel—one of which was pushing right into the bruise on her cheek. Her hip had something else digging into it, and the sprawl of her legs was starting to make her back ache. Getting old, she thought fuzzily.

Her mouth was a little open, and when she breathed in, she breathed in dust. It tasted of chloroform and fine chalky dirt, the gray stuff. It tasted metallic, too, like there was something else in the dirt. She couldn’t tell what past the taste of the chloroform.

Oh, hello.
She realized there was someone else here—she knew it was me before she even registered telepath.
Hi. Can’t get up right now. Have to carry me.

I’m not really there,
I told her.

Don’t really hate you.

I paused on that one. I tried to figure out whether that was her or the drugs talking, and decided it didn’t matter. Not right now.
Where are you?
If she knew where she was, this would be so much easier.

Not Georgia dirt, not red. Tastes bad. Don’t know.

How did they take you?

Suddenly, a flash of a furious struggle. Hatred. Embarrassed. She hadn’t seen them; so angry. Dropped her purse on the driveway—they ran in. Furious struggle, judo, elbows, teeth, anything—them slamming her against the car. Hurt. Fight, fight!—but they had the drug. She had to breathe, and the fuzzy air rushed over and over and she was gone.

Embarrassed. Her cheek hurt.

I found you with the link,
I said, feeling obligated to say it.
I’m going to need you to cooperate—let me find your location from your mind.

The link? Anger. Too close. Out of my head!

I can’t, I’m sorry. We need to find you—you need to let me find you. I’m not going to hurt you, not like this. Is it Bradley who took you? Did he take you to the Guild? To the warehouse? Somewhere else?

Just woke up. You can’t…You can’t…

Above the fuzzy chloroform thoughts, beyond the pain of the rock digging into her hip, she heard a sound. A voice, two voices. I paused to listen, hoping they’d give me the information I needed.

“You kidnapped a cop? How could you—”

“She knows too much. Bitch was sniffing around the warehouse this morning. Same bitch at the apartment—they’re taunting me.
He’s
taunting me. She was thinking about him the whole time, pretending to be angry with him. I couldn’t just let her snoop around,
could I? And Golden Boy needs to be taught a lesson.” A man’s voice, annoyed, sharp. Vaguely familiar.

A shuffle as the woman took a step forward. “A lesson? What, you kill her, just to get back at him? This is stupid. She’s a cop. They’re not going to stop until they find her.”

“So what? We just need a couple of days, then we’re out of town. Doesn’t matter what they know. The Darkness has teeth. We’ll be fine.”

“This is stupid, Jason. We need to get rid of her—alive—and get the hell out of town. On our own.”

So it was Bradley. Good, where were they?

“And turn down the money? I’m not walking away. Not going to let you walk away. Remember what happened to Neil, Tina. Remember. Two days and we’ll be scot-free.”

The woman’s voice lowered in volume and took on a soothing tone. “I’m not fighting. I’m not walking away; I’m in this just as much as you are. I just want to know what we’re going to do if they find us. Just a plan. That’s all I’m asking for.”

His voice was angry. “I’m tired of talking to you. They won’t find us. Our guy at the Guild won’t let them. Two days, we load up the trucks. That’s what we’re going to do. And you can either go along with it, or…”

“I understand,” the woman said in a very small tone. “Can we at least move the cop somewhere else?”

Bradley made a frustrated noise, and footsteps sounded, closer and closer. A boot crunched gravel right by Cherabino’s ear. I shivered, feeling her fear increase through the link.

Cherabino was lifted by two blocks of fuzzy force. She was confused—it didn’t feel like hands, like feet, like arms. She was panicking.
Telekinesis,
I told her,
recognizing the feeling from too many student pranks.
Calm down. The more you struggle, the worse it gets. Calm down. Let me in. We have to find where you are!

Hauled up against a body—thin, a man—Cherabino gasped with rage as he grabbed her breast. She struck out; still weak from the drug, still blind, but improving. Bastard!

Let me in,
I repeated. Should I force it?

“Stop that,” the man said, and struck her—pain!—across the cheek. The same cheek from before. Tears rolled. The voice was Bradley’s.

I decided to pull at the information….

Meanwhile the man got a better grip on her, and suddenly…

The whole world turned inside out like an Escher staircase. Immense, unthinkable pressure. Cherabino gone. My mind ripping, pulled a hundred directions at once, pressure, pulling, Möbius strip turning inside out and crushed—until…

I dropped forward out of the chair and vomited on the clean linoleum floor.

I breathed, on my hands and knees, tasting sour bile, back in the “real world,” while Mindspace wobbled and settled around me. Then, all at once, the headache hit me like a gale-force hurricane.

My hands gave out, and I hit headfirst on the linoleum, right in the middle of my own mess.

I cried, fat girly tears. Begged God to kill me. I slipped, over and over, on my own vomit, before my hand reached the light switch, eyes streaming.

The light hit my optic nerve like a hundred knives into my brain. Guilt rode me with spurs as my whole body reacted to the severed link. I’d failed. I didn’t know her location, and she was in terrible danger.

I limped, slowly, to the showers, ignoring the looks
from the few cops I passed. My eyes were still streaming. The light still felt like a drill in my skull. And all I could think about—other than my poison—was aspirin, crackers, and a cold shower. So cold it would shock my system out of reaction-pain and let me think. I had to save her.

Ten minutes later, as I shivered my ass off from a cold locker-room shower, the headache was manageable.

I found a spare desk in the main room. The department had ordered pizza, which only happened when
everyone
worked a first-priority. I got a slice and forced myself to choke down some of it, though my stomach was roiling. I’d need fuel for later, I told myself, forcing down another bite. No throwing it up.

I think that had been a Jump. I think someone had teleported Cherabino across some significant physical distance through Mindspace. Kara had teleported out once while still holding on to my mind. It had only taken once. I’d thrown up for two days. At least this time wasn’t quite so bad, I told myself, and forced down one more bite.

Bellury came and found me, a portable radio in his hand.

“Hello?” I asked.

A burst of static answered me. “Warehouse is clear,” Paulsen’s voice approximated. “Grab a ride with Forensics. We need you here.”

I fought down bile. I had lost a
huge
chunk of time if the warehouse raid had already gone down. I gave Bellury the radio, and looked back down at the half-eaten pizza slice. Probably enough. It would have to be. I needed to be there—to save Cherabino—now.

The ride down
in the crime-scene van was not pleasant, all the smells making me want to puke again, but we endured. The pizza was staying down, my head was starting to clear, and everybody in the van was holding on to calm, thinking, professional calm.

I was starting to center again, work through the pain.

We grounded next to the SWAT van, police cars staggering the rest of the lot. The warehouse was a beige-colored industrial box dotted with square openings on the side and top, docks for ground cars and air trucks to make deliveries. One of them was open. The others looked dirty, soot covered, as if they hadn’t been used in months.

I piled out of the van along with the crime techs, their minds anticipating what they’d find in long skittery strands of thought heavy on procedure. In front of me, despite the blinding headache, I could feel two strong presences in the warehouse. Like I’d told Cherabino so long ago, strong telepaths made a hell of a big wave in the world. There was no hiding, not with the way I felt now.

Friend or foe?
one of the telepaths sent to me; it registered in my mind like lemon juice on a paper cut. The guy was a forty-something man at the peak of his
training and career. He was Guild from the top of his head to the tip of his toes. I wanted to hate him on sight but couldn’t quite muster up the energy.

Friend, or close enough,
I told him, pushing through the pain.
Is Bradley unconscious?

No
,
gone when we got here. We’ve asked for Jumper backup, but it could take a couple of hours. What happened to you?

Severed Link,
I spat out.
I’ll be there in a minute.

I made my way up the stained concrete steps and through the loading dock into the cavernous warehouse, an endless space of dirt-splotched concrete under high glaring lights. A hundred feet in front of me, an island of large shapes and figures moving around like ants.

As I got closer to the group, I made out Lieutenant Paulsen by her posture of authority and the dark shade of her skin. She was facing off against what looked like the two “big fish” telepaths, both thin as whipcord, one dark and Indian, one blond and ugly, both overly confident.

“I don’t care what you have to do, you’re going after them,” Paulsen insisted. “The perps were here just a minute ago—see the cigarette still burning on the table? Not even all the way into the ashtray yet. They were here. I want to know where they went.” The table she pointed to was in a grouping with two sofas. She was right; a Marlboro cigarette still burned in the tray, letting off a steady stream of smoke and a smell I’d know anywhere. Swartz smoked Marlboros, or had.

Michael, the junior cop, ran up. He reached Paulsen, panting. “They… didn’t go out the back…ma’am. The dust is clean on the back step.”

She set her mouth. “Not out the back, then, and we would have seen them out the front. Michael, you and
the others start banging on floors and walls—if there’s a trapdoor, I want to know about it. Otherwise…” She gestured to the two hostile Guild members. “Right now you’re going to tell me how they left.”

The telepath on the right frowned. “There’s nothing we can—”

“Probably teleported, Lieutenant,” I said as I walked up.

She glanced at me, and the blond telepath frowned—hostile.

I ignored him, and the banging sound that came from Michael and the other cops following Paulsen’s orders. “Bradley’s a teleporter, remember? He’s been pulling enough other people along with him, I wouldn’t be surprised if he ’ported out of here himself.”

The telepath on the left, the dark one, shook his head at me. Apparently he didn’t think I should be telling the normals anything. “We don’t know that’s how they escaped,” he said, to Paulsen. And, to me, mind to mind,
Without a Jumper, we can’t follow him. There’s no point in making promises.