Vacant (24 page)

“There were extenuating circumstances, sir,” she said. “May I explain?”

“Please do.” He stood, waiting, and all the weight of all the eyes in the room were on Cherabino.

She felt that weight like a thousand knives. She wanted to concentrate, and she wanted me, at least, not to be here.

Are you sure?

Yes, she was sure. She had to be clear and concise and defend herself, and she didn't need the distraction. She appreciated me trying, though. She appreciated it more than she could express. But I needed to leave now.

With deep regret, I let go of the Link and found myself back in my own body, at the bottom of a darkened coat closet, my head feeling like an ice pick was jammed behind my eyes.

Was Cherabino going to be okay? I hadn't realized
things were so horrible. If they were even turning her sensei's words against her . . . I should be there. Regardless of what she said, I should be there. If her world was falling down around her, I should be there. But I couldn't. The guilt of that twisted around my guts, a parasite draining my energy.

Cherabino was in the worst fight of her life, watching all of her life's work being degraded, her character being called into question, and there was nothing I could do. It hurt. It hurt on a deep level.

I was failing her, just as surely as I was failing Tommy. I didn't know what she'd do if it all fell apart.

I breathed, over and over again, getting the emotions and the pain under control. But when I went to reconnect with Tommy . . . I couldn't. I tried over and over, but the pain only got worse. And I just couldn't, not now. I couldn't help Cherabino, and I couldn't help Tommy. And I'd broken all my ethics to get here—and here was not working.

I picked myself up, eyes watering, head hurting.

For the first time in ten years, I regretted the lack of Guild drugs. They handed out the things like candy, and I'd never approved of how often they were used. If I had a focus drug now, though, I could reconnect with Tommy. Perhaps do myself damage, but I could make my mind work beyond the pain, beyond the warning signals. Maybe help him, so I could get back to Cherabino faster. Maybe I could be there for her.

Maybe the world wouldn't fall apart, if I had drugs.

Then again, it might not work. And I couldn't have drugs of any kind on the program, not unless they were doctor-prescribed for a legitimate medical condition, and sometimes not even then. Oh, and aspirin. If you didn't abuse it. Aspirin sounded wonderful about now. The Twelve Steps
said it was all too easy to fall for another, different drug, and today I understood.

I got up, heartsick, opened the door, and went looking for aspirin and food, in that order. As guilty as I felt, I had to do something. Otherwise I would be locked in that closet for the next three weeks, and be no good to anyone.

Sunglasses on and
aspirin taken, I took a bowl of rehydrated dehydrated very bad soup to Mendez, along with a cup of freshly brewed coffee.

Thanks,
she mouthed as she listened to the headphones, making another notation in a colored marker on the map, which was starting to have more marker splotches than printed areas. She gestured for me to put the food down across the table, beyond the county map she'd set up and was working on.

Finally she pulled down the headphones. Her eyes had dark circles under them, and her hands shook. When I looked at the clock, I saw it had been nearly three hours for both of us, and neither one of us had had it easy. Outside the front porch, the sun was going down, the light getting longer and more orange inside the house. Friday night, and not a happy night for anyone.

“Did it work?” she asked me tiredly. “Whatever it was you wanted to work?”

“Not enough,” I told her, my own exhaustion meeting hers in Mindspace. “But I did connect with him a little. He's outside the city, I think, or at least surrounded by an awful lot of trees.”

Mendez looked at the maps in front of her. “Yeah, that would have to be the case. We've covered most all of the city block by block. Any idea of direction?”

“Trees. Lots of trees.”

“I hear the frustration. Trust me, we're all there. You keep working. Once they've got him settled, his odds go down, so we need to keep moving.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Eat the soup. I'll get my own bowl and come back, okay?”

“Thanks,” she said. “Oh, coffee!”

I turned as she was pulling her headphones back up, microphone circling out. But then I felt the minds approaching the house. Jarrod, and Sridarin, both tired and upset, and then . . . then a mind I thought must be the judge. I didn't know her as well, especially from a distance. She hadn't let me put a tag on her.

*   *   *

“It's time for you to leave,” the judge's voice echoed through the porch windows.

Mendez looked up, pausing in what she was doing over the maps.

There was a reply, muffled, a lower man's voice.

“Don't you think you've done enough?” the judge's voice echoed, again too loud.

The door opened, and the judge, Jarrod, and Sridarin entered the house.

Jarrod and the judge stopped. The judge stood just a little too close, her arms extended in a classic “power posture”; Jarrod's body language wasn't budging in response. He wasn't happy.

“Judge Parson, you must realize that—”

“I must realize? I must realize? You . . . you people lost my son! You let him be taken by criminals! I don't see one possible thing that you can do for me here that you can't screw up elsewhere. And I don't want to look at you. You get out of my house, all of you.”

“I understand you're upset. But—”

“This is not a discussion, this is me informing you that you are leaving. You have half an hour to get your things out of my house.”

“Ma'am,” Sridarian said then.

“That includes you. Everyone.” She crossed her arms, taking a visible posture of waiting. “Twenty-nine minutes thirty seconds.”

I could see Jarrod thinking, see it like bubbles moving in a pot of boiling water. Finally he stepped back, calculation still moving behind his eyes. “Let's pack up, people.”

“Really?” I asked. “You're coordinating half the city's police and federal forces from that console there. We can't leave now.”

“And you,” the judge said to me, “you. You'd better pray they find my son again. Because if they don't, I am holding you personally responsible.” And she made a show of turning her back on me.

I felt . . . sliced open, like a cat-o'-nine-tails from the old movies had sliced my face in a thousand cuts. She was right. Even if the words made me bleed, made the guilt rush out like water. It was my fault, and she knew it.

Mendez put her hand on my shoulder, on the fabric of my shirt, in solidarity. Her mind strengthened briefly, but all I felt was that solidarity. Then she was moving, her intention to get out of this place quickly.

Ten minutes later, in the car outside, my stuff in a single bag next to me, I was feeling twitchy. I couldn't take the condemnation in the judge's eyes. I couldn't take the condemnation in my own. I wanted ten cigarettes in a row, and I wanted my drug, but I wasn't going to get either one, maybe. My hands shook anyway.

The trunk opened, then a thud and a reshuffling of the
car, once, twice, three times as heavy equipment was added. Then the slam of the trunk closing, and the front passenger-side door opened.

“That was harsh,” Mendez said. She folded into the front seat and shut the door. “She's hurting, and the harsh has nothing to do with you.”

“She's right, though,” I said, still itching to be somewhere, anywhere but here. “I took Tommy outside the courthouse. I lost him.” The knowledge sat on me like a heavy weight, impossible to dislodge, crushing me.

Mendez was quiet for a moment, considering. She realized we hadn't discussed this, that no one had discussed this. There hadn't been time. “So far as it goes, that's true. Sibley and his crew . . . they had an established plan, though. They had the shock grenade. It's impossible to know. Maybe they would have managed it anyway. Neither Loyola nor I was expecting a crew like that. Not then and there.”

“You should have,” I said then, resentful. “The first attack, if nothing else, should have told you that.”

“It's easy to assume we should have known things in retrospect. But the attackers were dead by then,” she said. “Another group was working, if any. Sibley—if we believed he was a threat at all—historically has worked alone. We were more concerned about a stealth jaunt at the house, to be honest with you. He surprised us.” She paused, and I felt a wave of exhaustion go off her again. “We all fell down on this one. In retrospect, we should not have left you alone for such long periods. But it's more important to find him now than it is to throw blame.”

“It was my job!” I fell down on my job.

“You were the first to tell us that Minding isn't your specialty. You adapt to your personnel, or you should. Jarrod's been distracted, but I should have said something.”

“It's not your fault,” I said automatically. It's something
you'd say in the interview rooms, with a witness who was telling you the truth as she'd seen it.

“It's as much mine as yours. There's plenty of blame to go around,” Mendez said. I felt her guilt there, but I felt her determination more.

“What are we waiting for?” I asked.

“Jarrod and I can leave at our discretion, and likely Loyola—if he will. Sridarin is assigned directly to the judge, not her son, and Loyola has taken on that responsibility as well. I imagine Jarrod's sticking around for support, and to make another set of phone calls. It's been a lot, working as the coordination point for the agencies. The ATF, at least, is picking up the ball with the local PD.”

“How likely is it that you think we'll find him?” I asked her.

“I just gave out your information to everyone, so they're packing up in city center. Honestly we were about done there as well. They're looking outside the city in the direction of the flight out. I've done these cases before. Sometimes something will pop, and now's the time if they're outside the city. It helps that the PD knows it's a judge on their side of the table. Sibley's organized, but he can't possibly have accounted for us mobilizing as fast as we did. We'll get there.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Give Jarrod another few minutes and he'll be out here. Most of the gear is already with us. We'll move to a hotel and set up shop there. It won't be the first time.”

“You're not upset about Tommy at all,” I said. I regretted it immediately; the tone petulant and guilty. But she wasn't, and it bothered me.

Mendez turned all the way around in her seat then. “
Don't
allow your emotions to take you over. There will be a time to be upset, but that time is not today. Today, we do everything. Today, we find him.”

“Okay,” I said. She was probably right.

“You are new, I understand. But you cannot fall apart. It cannot happen.”

“Okay,” I said. Took three deep breaths, and forced more of my emotions into that little box, that little strongbox with the iron-reinforced sides.

*   *   *

The hotel was a mile or so out of town, on the interstate, an ancient hotel that was scrupulously maintained. The clerk at the front was a college kid, but he'd been an athlete at one time and had plenty of confidence.

“Room 202, that's on the right,” he said as he took my hurriedly scrawled form and deposited a key in its place. Mendez and Jarrod had already been through this process, getting rooms for themselves and a central room from which to run the equipment.

The clerk leaned forward and pointed his arm to the right. “See the staircase there? Up a floor, turn left, fourth door on the left. You want to be on the quiet side of the place, that's where you go.”

He turned back to his book without further comment, a dismissal if ever I heard one. But the book was a collection of Robert Frost, and he read loudly to himself in Mindspace thoughts, so that “The Road Less Traveled” followed me out the door and into the night.

The irony was not lost on me. Nope, not even a little.

*   *   *

The room was small and sad, and it echoed with various shades of loneliness, the faded flowered curtains rubbing shoulders with a downtrodden pale carpet. The bed squeaked when I sat down on it, but it held. The nightstand and chest of drawers were covered in scratches and faded with age, but clean. The whole room seemed clean, actually, at least on the surface; an odd, musty smell remained,
though. Perhaps somebody smoking in the room, though smoking what, I couldn't tell you. From the smell, perhaps something with mold as a key ingredient.

I checked the shower—a real water-shower, no sonics in sight—and found it clean enough. No visible mold anyway, and wherever the smell was coming from wasn't the sheets either. This would do.

Then I went back out on the balcony for a cigarette of my own, watching the drizzle of the day fall slowly to earth. It still felt strange to smell the faint salt of ocean in the air, and see gnats in clouds. It was strange to feel the ancient oaks, almost minds, settled into Mindspace. And most of all, it was strange to be without Cherabino. I missed her terribly, worse now when she was not here to tell me to stop whining and start working. She would have told me what to do about Tommy. She would have fixed this, or at least kept me from screwing it up worse. My hands shook with all the things I couldn't think about, chief among which was how much I wanted my drug.

I stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray, unable to get the taste of failure out of my mouth. Both Cherabino and Swartz wouldn't stand for me giving up, not at this point, not when I could be doing something—anything—that might help the kid I'd come here to save.

But I felt the vision barreling toward me, becoming more and more real, and I was beginning to believe I couldn't stop it.

I called the department to leave the new number for Cherabino, and talked to Michael again. Then I called Swartz and got Selah.

“He's having a bad day. He's finally sleeping. Is it an emergency?” she asked me, voice defeated.

I paused, wrestling with the question. It was bad. It was pretty bad. But I didn't think I was going to use right now,
and I'd be around the FBI most of the day, which would keep me from doing it if I changed my mind. Plus, Swartz had had a heart attack not too many months ago and it was a bad day.

“Adam?” she asked.

“No,” I said slowly. “No, it's not an emergency.”

But as the dial tone rang, I wondered if that was really right. It was pretty damn bad right now.

I changed shirts and went back downstairs. Jarrod and the others had probably been waiting for me a long damn time, and I shouldn't keep them waiting anymore.

I worried still, about Cherabino, about the man whose memories I'd stolen against all ethical boundaries, and about Tommy. Above all, I worried about Tommy. What were they doing to him? Was he even still alive?