Vacant (12 page)

“What?”

“Sibley. Remember him?”

“It's not like I could forget that guy. It's just weird. No one uses the word ‘nemesis.' Isn't he still in jail?” she asked.

“Obviously not,” I said.

She made a frustrated sound. “We worked our asses off to get him in jail. Hell, some good cops bled to get him there. I'll ask Michael to track it down. I'm not supposed to be working active cases right now, but—”

“You're getting Michael to keep working them anyway,” I finished for her. “He probably needs the experience in working something on his own anyway.”

I could almost see her blink, shifting gears all of a sudden. “Well, yes. And I'm not letting that son of a bitch walk around without me having something to say about it.”

“I just . . .”

“What?”

I had to talk to someone. I had to. “You know the thing I didn't put in the report with Sibley?”

“Yeah. . . .” She seemed cautious.

I hadn't put Sibley's device in the report because I knew that kind of mind-control thing was not only illegal, but
might start an active panic with the normals. I'd reported it to the Guild like I was supposed to, but there was no way of knowing how far they'd gotten. Sibley hadn't had it when he was taken into custody. I didn't know where the thing was.

“Well, if it happens again—and I don't know whether it will—I'm not sure whether I can do my job here. He almost killed me last time, Cherabino.”

“Oh.” She seemed tired all of a sudden; I couldn't tell if that was whatever Link between our minds finally letting her emotions echo, or whether I was dreaming that emotion up, or projecting it from my own experience. “Yeah. I'm sorry. Do you have a knife or something?” It was illegal for me to carry a gun and we both knew it.

“No,” I said, “there wasn't time when I left Atlanta.”

“Well, see if they'll get you one, okay? Having a holdout weapon has saved my life more than once.”

I'd been there for one of those times. “I'll ask,” I said, even though it would hurt to admit I needed a weapon. My mind was normally all the weapon I needed, but I'd do whatever it took to protect Tommy and get us both out of this. I'd rather have her here, though. I'd rather she be here to carry the weapons. I missed her.

She yawned, loudly.

I wanted so much then to lean on her, to talk about the case. I wanted to lean on her, to involve her, just to be with her. But she was under one of the worst stresses in the world right now, and I couldn't add to that. No matter how much it hurt.

I did the noble thing then. “I've got an early morning,” I said. “I need to go.”

“Okay,” she said, and yawned again.

I hung up, but it took every ounce of strength I had, and it left me alone. I wanted the drug then. I wanted it, but I couldn't have it. And that hurt too.

*   *   *

The next morning I was woken by a ringing phone. I lifted my head from the cushion, and my whole body creaked.

“Wha?” I said.

Tommy stood over me. “The phone's ringing,” he said.

I mumbled something. I felt like I'd hardly slept at all.

“Aren't you going to get it?” he asked.

“Get what?”

“The phone.” He sighed and went over to pick it up himself, but it stopped ringing on its own before he touched it. He frowned at it.

I sat up, bones hurting against the hardwood floor, and ran my hands through my hair. A pile of files were fanned out in a messy pile next to the phone. My late-night reading.

“Well, go get him!” a bellow came from down the hallway.

Mendez, the female FBI agent who'd gone with Tanya to the hospital, trotted down the hallway. “What are you doing with a phone in the hallway?” she asked me, then: “You know what? Never mind, go ahead and pick up. Jarrod's irritated. Who's calling you anyway?”

“Let's find out,” I said, and sat up. I picked up the phone, conscious of her standing there and staring at me. Tommy was doing the same from another angle. Observation in stereo, with me having just woken up, my hair doubtlessly cowlicked to perfection. I reminded myself I'd had perfect strangers watch me do far more personal things than talk on the phone.

“Hello?” a man's voice said on the other side of the line.

I introduced myself. “Who is this?”

“It's Stone,” he said. “You left a message.”

“Yeah, just letting you know I'm out of town and unavailable for work,” I said, choosing my words carefully with the audience. “It's unavoidable.”

“You're out of town. Where?”

I looked at my audience. The city was large enough to make it difficult to find me, and it wasn't a secret. I hazarded the truth. “Savannah.”

Mendez shook her head.

I shrugged.

“I can find some work for you to do there,” Stone said. “There's a school—”

I cut him off. “I'm consulting, and will be for the whole week. You asked me to call you when I'll be out of touch and I did.”

“There's no need to be rude about it,” he said.

I frowned into the phone. “I'm not being rude. I'm telling you what you asked me to tell you. I'll call you next week, okay?”

“You still owe the Guild a significant debt,” he said.

Great. Probably the stupid call was being recorded, and certainly I was being watched by Mendez and Tommy. Oh, what the hell? “I'm making payments. You know where to find me. What's the issue?”

“Debt collector?” Mendez asked, an eyebrow up.

I rolled my eyes and nodded. “I'm making payments,” I said. “Honestly, you're out of line.”

I felt Stone poke at the tag he'd left in my head.

I forced myself to tolerate it. I didn't like having someone in my head I hadn't invited, and between him and the boy and the half-faded Link with Cherabino, my head was getting to be a well-traveled place. “You done?” I finally asked.

“You're not under duress,” he said quietly.

I was surprised. “No. No, not at all.”

A general sense of acceptance. “If you run into trouble, you can call me,” he said. And then he hung up.

Wait. I could call him? And why would he say so? I was very confused.

“What was that about?” Tommy asked.

“Ask Mendez,” I said. “I need a shower.” I creaked up onto my feet, clothes mussed, and grabbed my bag next to the pallet.

Then I stopped. I could feel his hurt. I sighed and went back to him. “I'm sorry. I'm groggy in the mornings. I don't feel good. But I shouldn't have snapped at you.” I looked over at Mendez. Oh, what the hell. He was a kid, and the rest of his world was falling apart. The least I could do was tell him the truth. I turned only to Tommy, ignoring her. “I made a deal with the medical part of the Guild to save my friend's life when he couldn't afford it,” I told him. “It's a source of ongoing stress, because they want to be paid faster than I can pay them. But my friend is okay now, and I'm making payments.”

“You saved your friend's life?” the kid asked in a small, awed voice.

I sat on my irritation. “I asked for help,” I said. “Sometimes you have to do that. Now, can I take a shower in the bathroom at the end of the hall?”

“Sure,” Tommy said, still in a little of that awed tone.

As I passed Mendez, she was thinking maybe I wasn't so bad after all. That and intimate details about her latest girlfriend that I would rather not have known.

When I got
out of the shower, freshly shaved and dressed in clean clothes, I felt better. I'd kept tabs on Tommy's mind from a distance, ready to dash out and handle something if necessary, but the spiderweb I'd set up hadn't vibrated with any new minds, and everyone seemed calm. Not that I was good at this, mind you, but my old skills were tolerable. I thought.

I stuck my head in Tommy's room, only to find him playing with the antigravity boats again.

“Where's my mom?” he asked.

“I'll find out,” I said. “You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.” I waited, but he went back to his boats and said nothing else. But I couldn't exactly strap him to a chair because I didn't feel comfortable right now, and getting a little distance—briefly—might help me settle without scaring him. I went back out to the main room, deciding to check in with Jarrod on the way.

Jarrod was waiting for me. He looked grim.

“I was just about to do that report,” I said. “Really. Tommy is fine, and there are no apparent threats.”

“It's not that. Tanya died this morning in the hospital,” he said. “Seat belt syndrome, they said. Jason is pulling through and was just moved out of intensive care.”

“Oh,” I said. My stomach dropped into my guts. “Oh.” I looked around for a chair to sit in, finally settling for a footstool in front of a table. At least I thought it was a footstool; it was oblong in shape with a flat top. It seemed like a stupid thing to focus on right now.

I'd just met Tanya the day before, but I could have sworn . . . “I didn't notice the shock in time, did I?” Guilt crawled all over me. She shouldn't have died. Not for something like that. Not after saving Tommy.

Jarrod looked grim. “None of us did. She was sitting right here, in the room with me, while I was doing technical checks. None of us are happy about this, Ward.” He took a breath. “I will want a full report from you—it's overdue—but some new information has changed our threat assessments. I need your help.”

I looked up. “What do you need?”

“You were the last person to talk to Tanya, and to be honest the only one of my team to get her full account of what happened. Jason is still unconscious. You are the closest thing we have to an adult eyewitness. Ideally . . . if you're serious about your investigation on the scene, I want you to walk the area with me.” He paused, and I could feel calculations going on behind his eyes. A lot of them. Finally he said, “We're due in court shortly. Make sure you're ready.”

“Court?” I asked.

“The courthouse anyway. I want to keep an eye on the judge, and the locals aren't taking things as seriously as I would like,” Jarrod said. “I have a strong feeling that if this is all connected to the murder trial as we assume, the best and first place to find out where the threats are coming from is that courthouse.”

“I can't leave Tommy,” I said. “Not more than a hundred feet. Two hundred, maybe, in an emergency, but I wouldn't
recommend it.” I ran my hands through my hair, uncomfortable. It was still wet from the shower. “I don't like separating the two of us from the main group.” I was still new enough at this Minding thing not to be sure I could handle things completely on my own. I hadn't been completely on my own in years. At minimum, there had always been Cherabino and her gun available. I hoped she was okay today, the first day of her hearing. I wished I could be there.

“We'll bring Tommy along,” Jarrod said. “And if I can get away, we'll bring him to the crime scene anyway. With any luck, he'll be able to tell us more than Tanya did.”

I paused. “Don't you think this all is putting a lot of pressure on him? He's just a kid. I mean, he should be at school, right?”

Jarrod shook his head. “Not with the permissions the judge has already for independent study. Like you said, we can't split up the group. He's going to have to be brave. You're going to have to figure out how to make him brave.”

I swallowed. That seemed like such a huge responsibility on top of the other half dozen things Jarrod wanted from me. I suddenly understood why this job was paying so much.

“Anything else?” Jarrod asked me. “We need to leave in twenty, so make it quick.”

“Tommy wants to know where his mom is.”

“The sheriff's team has already escorted her to the courthouse. She wanted to be there extremely early, and they failed to inform me. We'll be discussing that later. In either case, they're more responsible for her safety than we are.”

I thought about that and then finally ventured, “We're going to have to tell Tommy about the bodyguard.”

“I'd rather not.”

“We've established that he can get to information from
me without me necessarily controlling it,” I said. “If I know, he needs to know. I don't imagine anybody—much less a kid—is going to take that information well as a secret.”

Jarrod took a deep breath, then let it out. “I'll do it, but I'll do it in the car, en route, where we can control things better. Now get yourself and Tommy ready. Like I said, we leave in twenty.”

*   *   *

The phone rang next to me in the hallway, and without thinking about it, I leaned down to pick up the receiver.

“Hello?” I said while all three FBI agents around me froze, one gesturing wildly.

“Who is this?” a man's voice said on the other side of the line.

Special Agent Jarrod mouthed something at me. I didn't understand, but I pulled the information from his mind—
this could be a call from the person behind the attack today, and it could be dangerous to say FBI. Also dangerous to hang up too quickly.

“I'm Adam Ward,” I said before the silence got too long, lacking any better answer.

“Adam Ward?” a man's voice said, a voice that sounded all too familiar.

“That's right. Who is this?”

“You have to be a few hundred miles from where you're supposed to be.” He laughed, but the sound was ugly. “What a coincidence. Well, you were next on my list in any case.”

“What do you mean?” I asked slowly, looking at Jarrod.

“You'll find out soon enough,” the man said, still in that familiar voice that made me feel like a mouse in a trap. “Now put the judge on the phone.”

It was Sibley, the man who'd nearly killed me. The man who was threatening Tommy in the vision. He was out of
jail, obviously, and focused on the judge, exactly like I'd feared. Adrenaline dumped into my system.

“Put the phone down,” Special Agent Jarrod hissed.

“I can't do that,” I said to them both. My heart beat too quickly.

“Fine,” Sibley said. “But be aware, if you're tangled up in this I will treat you accordingly. Tell the judge if she doesn't do what my boss has told her to do, and soon, we will follow through on his threat.”

“What threat was that?” I asked quickly. Around me the agents were scrambling, turning on the electronics, but I knew it would be too late. My stomach was sinking. None of this would be recorded, would it?

“It's simple. He'll destroy the thing she loves the most if she doesn't do what was agreed.”

Crap. That sounded ominous. But I had to keep pushing, had to keep getting more information. “That attack on her son today, that was you, wasn't it?”

“What an idiotic question. You'll have to get smarter if you want to survive this game with my boss. And by the way, he's not forgotten your trip to his home. Don't think you'll be able to forget it either.”

Across the room, the red light on the electronics setup finally went on.

Jarrod held out his hand for the receiver, and I handed it over. But I could hear the dial tone even as I did so.

I sat down, the pit in my stomach vacant, painfully vacant.

Mendez looked up from the electronics panel with a burst of frustration I could feel. “No,” she said to Jarrod. He hung up the phone.

“What just happened?” he asked both of us in an intense tone. Loyola sat down in a chair with a frown.

“Sibley just called,” I told the floor. “He just called, and it looks like my vision will come true.”

“Nonsense,” Jarrod said. “You said yourself we can head this off. We'll do just that. Stay close, take steps, and we'll do the same.”

Loyola shifted. “At least we know the major threat now.”

“But we can't prove it,” Mendez said quietly. “We still have to make the connections.”

Jarrod straightened his posture and looked directly at me. “I expect a detailed report. Go find yourself some paper and pencil and write down the conversation word for word. I expect it done in the next ten minutes.”

“Um, okay,” I said. The adrenaline was still coursing through my system, my hands shaking, my body wanting to run. I wanted my drug, or at least a cigarette. I wanted to lock myself into a small closet and call Cherabino.

But I didn't get to do that today. Today I had to make sure Tommy was safe, and that the vision didn't happen. Right now that seemed an incredibly tall order.

“And you,” Jarrod said to Loyola. “Make sure Tommy is ready to leave on time. Mendez and I will be figuring out why we didn't record this. Ward?” he prompted when I didn't respond.

“Yes, sir,” I said, and stood. “I'll get you the information.” But inside, I was shaking.

*   *   *

Tommy finally came outside to the car, bringing four different bags. I accepted the rebellion, carried the stupid bags, and loaded the car. My Ability to defend myself wasn't dependent on me having hands free, and that wasn't true of anyone else here. Since I was still jumping at the smallest sounds, the smallest changes in Mindspace, it was probably good to give me something to do. Too much adrenaline was as bad for focus as too little.

When I noticed Tommy looking at me funny, I sat down hard on the roiling emotions. I had to be in control. I had
to. Otherwise it would scare him, and I'd done that one too many times already for comfort.
Control, Adam. Control. You're a highly trained telepath—you can do this.

We piled into an armored limousine, the only car Loyola could find on short notice, and went. Jarrod sat in the back with Tommy, me next to him. The boy had his arms crossed, and he was looking at me like he knew I was holding something back.

Finally, halfway there, Jarrod told him about Tanya's death. But he told him like you'd tell a cop—all matter-of-fact and
I'm sorry
—and it didn't go over well at all.

Overwhelming anger and grief poured out of that child like water from a faucet, flooding the Mindspace all around. I braced myself against it. Holy crap, that kid could be strong as a telepath in a few years. But he just sat there, controlled. His eyes watered, and he stared, shocked, but nothing happened for a long moment.

Then he broke down, and yelled, and screamed, and Mendez almost drove off the road it was so sudden.

“You said she would be okay!” he yelled at me. “You said! You said!”

“I know,” I said, it killing me. “I know. I'm sorry.” I said it over and over again.

But it was like the relief of pressure from a valve; I rode it out, knowing that he needed this moment. Hell, I needed this moment. Jarrod seemed discomfited.

Then the emotion got weaker, and weaker, until a general low sense of despair passed between us.

Tommy turned around and buried his head in my armpit, and I held him, awkwardly. His small back shook as he reached out mentally—and asked if it was all true. I confirmed that to him, mind to mind, with regret, and patted his back. He cried, and he cried. I might have joined him, a little, in the backlash of all that emotion. Coming down
from all that adrenaline was hard enough on its own, and I got it. I really did.

Death was horrible. And it didn't get better with time; it got worse, especially as you got older. Death made you feel small, and helpless, and aching with the unfairness of it all. I hadn't known Tanya well, so her death was an abstract still, though it would hit me later. But there were other deaths. Dane had died, my best friend at the Guild. My mother had died, in a slow, horrible slide through illness to death, until at last the death was a relief and her absence a piece forever missing. Last year, Bellury had died because I'd been an idiot to go in without backup. Death was horrible, and if Tommy was crashing into it, I crashed too.

I held him, and I was there, but that was all I could do. I felt helpless. I had nothing to offer him, except the kinds of things Swartz said about heaven and justice in the next life, things I wanted to believe, and on my best days, kinda did. I had nothing to offer him, except that I was there. He and I, ten and forty, both caught in the grief and railing against the unfairness of it all. I got it. I got it all too well.

Jarrod, like a cop, had kept his eyes averted. After maybe ten minutes he couldn't take the silence, and so he spoke. “None of us thought this would happen. Sometimes you just . . . sometimes things happen. I'm sorry.”

Tommy sniffed and pulled away from me. “You didn't even care about her at all,” he said to Jarrod. “I want my mom.”

“It was her job,” Jarrod said. “It was her job and she did a good job.” He regretted all of this messiness.

Now I was on Tommy's side. A good woman had died today, had died because we were too stupid to get her to the hospital earlier. Had died because . . . because someone had attacked Tommy, and it wasn't fair, and it wasn't right.

And I was here to make sure this kid lived. It was a huge responsibility, a nearly impossible weight on my shoulders.
I wondered how I'd pull it off. I worried I wouldn't be able to.

“Be angry,” Loyola said to Tommy from the front seat, after being silent the whole trip. “You be angry. You cry and be angry and do what you have to do. But you don't forget, she chose this. She chose to do her job and keep you safe over everything else. Remember she chose you. Remember her for doing that.”